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BY 


TWO BROTHERS. 

.f 


FIFTH EDITION. 


Maims o’ apiaTos ocrns eiKctfei /caAws. 

The best divine is he who well divines. 


>-> > 

<• > ♦* 

LONDON: 

WALTON AND MABEELY, 

UPPER GOWER STREET, AND IVY LANE, PATERNOSTER ROW. 
SOLD BY MACMILLAN & Co., CAMBRIDGE. 













LONDON : 

BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS. 


GIFT 

ESTATE OF 
WILLIAM C. RIVES 
APRIL, Wfi 


TO WILLIAM WOEDSWOBTH. 


My honoured Friend, 

The favour I have always experienced from you 
emboldens me to address you publicly by this name. 
For more than twenty years I have cherisht the wish 
of offering some testimony of my gratitude to him by 
whom my eyes were opened to see and enjoy the world 
of poetry in nature and in books. In this feeling, he, 
who shared all my feelings, fully partook. You knew 
my brother; and though he was less fortunate than I 
have been, in having fewer opportunities of learning 
from your living discourse, you could not deny him that 
esteem and affection, with which all delighted to regard 
him. Your writings were among those he prized the 
most: and unless this little work had appeared anony¬ 
mously when it first came out, he would have united 
with me in dedicating it to you. 

Then too would another name have been associated 
with yours,—the name of one to whom we felt an equal 
and like obligation, a name which, I trust, will ever be 
coupled with yours in the admiration and love of 
Englishmen,—the name of Coleridge. You and he 











iv TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 

came forward together in a shallow, hard, worldly age, 
—an age alien and almost averse from the higher and 
more strenuous exercises of imagination and thought,— 
as the purifiers and regenerators of poetry and philo¬ 
sophy. It was a great aim; and greatly have you both 
wrought for its accomplishment. Many, among those 
who are now England’s best hope and stay, will respond 
to my thankful acknowledgement of the benefits my heart 
and mind have received from you both. Many will echo 
' my wish, for the benefit of my country, that your 
; influence and his may be more and more widely diffused. 

| Many will join in my prayer, that health and strength of 
l body and mind may be granted to you, to complete the 
! noble works which you have still in store, so that men 
may learn more worthily to understand and appreciate 
what a glorious gift God bestows on a nation when He 
gives them a poet. 

Had this work been dedicated to you then, it might 
have pleased you more to see your great friend’s name 
beside your own. The proof of my brother’s regard too 
would have endeared the offering. Then,—if you will 
allow me to quote a poem, which, from its faithful 
expression of fraternal love, has always sounded to me 
like the voice of my own heart,—“There were two 
springs which bubbled side by side, As if they had been' 
made that they might be Companions for each other.” 
But now for a while that blessed companionship has been 











TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 


interrupted : “ One has disappeared: The other, left 
behind, is flowing still.” Yet, small as the tribute is, 
and although it must come before you without these 
recommendations, may you still accept it in consideration 
of the reverence which brings it; and may you continue 
to think with your wonted kindness 

Of your affectionate Servant, 

Julius Charles Hare. 

Herstmonceux, 

January, 1838. 















TO THE HEADER. 


I here present you with a few suggestions, the fruits, 
alas! of much idleness. Such of them as are distinguisht 
by some capital letter, I have borrowed from my acuter 
friends. My own are little more than glimmerings, I 
had almost said dreams, of thought: not a word in them 
is to he taken on trust. 

If then I am addressing one of that numerous class, 
who read to be told what to think, let me advise you to 
meddle with the hook no further. You wish to buy a 
house ready furnisht: do not come to look for it in a 
stonequarry. But if you are building up your opinions 
for yourself, and only want to be provided with materials, 
you may meet with many things in these pages to suit 
you. Do not despise them for their want of name and 
show. Remember what the old author says, that “ even 
to such a one as I am, an idiota or common person, no 
great things, melancholizing in woods and quiet places 
by rivers, the Goddesse herself Truth has oftentimes 
appeared.” 

Reader, if you weigh me at all, weigh me patiently; 
judge me candidly ; and may you find half the satisfac¬ 
tion in examining my Guesses, that I have myself had 
in making them. 









viii 


TO THE READER. 


Authors usually do not think about writing a preface, 
until they have reacht the conclusion ; and with reason. 
For few have such stedfastness of purpose, and such 
definiteness and clear foresight of understanding, as to 
know, when they take up their pen, how soon they shall 
lay it down again. The foregoing paragraphs were 
written some months ago : since that time this little 
book has increast to more than four times the hulk then 
contemplated, and withal has acquired two fathers 
instead of one. The temptations held out by the free¬ 
dom and pliant aptness of the plan,—the thoughtful 
excitement of lonely rambles, of gardening, and of other 
like occupations, in which the mind has leisure to muse 
during the healthful activity of the body, with the fresh, 
wakeful breezes blowing round it,—above all, intercourse 
and converse with those, every hour in whose society is 
rich in the blossoms of present enjoyment, and in the 
seeds of future meditation, in whom too the Imagination 
delightedly recognises living realities goodlier and fairer 
than her fairest and goodliest visions, so that pleasure 
kindles a desire in her of portraying what she cannot 
hope to surpass,—these causes, happening to meet to¬ 
gether, have occasioned my becoming a principal in a 
work, wherein I had only lookt forward to being a sub¬ 
ordinate auxiliary. The letter u, with which my earlier 
contributions were markt, has for distinction’s sake con¬ 
tinued to he affixt to them. As our minds have grown 
up together, have been nourisht in great measure by the 
same food, have sympathized in their affections and their 
aversions, and been shaped reciprocally by the assimilat¬ 
ing influences of brotherly communion, a family likeness 





TO THE READER. 


ix 

will, I trust, be perceivable tbrougbout these volumes, 
although perhaps with such differences as it is not dis¬ 
pleasing to behold in the children of the same parents. 
And thus I commit this book to the world, with a prayer 
that He, to whom so much of it, if I may not say the 
whole, is devoted, will, if He think it worthy to be em¬ 
ployed in His service, render it an instrument of good to 
some of His children. May it awaken some one to the 
knowledge of himself! May it induce some one to think 
more kindly of his neighbour ! May it enlighten some 
one to behold the footsteps of God in the Creation! u. 

May \lth , 1827. 


In this new edition the few remarks found among my 
brother’s papers, suitable to the work, have been, or will 
be incorporated. Unfortunately for the work they are 
but few. Soon after the publication of the first edition, 
he gave up guessing at Truth, for the higher office of 
preaching Truth. How faithfully he discharged that 
office, may be seen in the two volumes of his Sermons. 
And now he has been raised from the earth to the 
full fruition of that Truth, of which he had first 
been the earnest seeker, and then the dutiful servant 
and herald. 

My own portion of the work has been a good deal 
enlarged. On looking it over for the press, I found 
much that was inaccurate, more that was unsatisfactory. 
Many thoughts seemed to need being more fully developt. 
Ten years cannot pass over one’s head, least of all in 
these eventful times, without modifying sundry opinions. 
A change of position too brings a new horizon, and new 









TO THE READER. 


points of view. And when old thoughts are awakened, 
it is as with old recollections : a long train of associations 
start up; nor is it. easy to withstand the pleasure of 
following them out. Yarious however as are the matters 
discust or toucht on in the following pages, I would fain 
hope that one spirit will he felt to breathe through them. 
It would be a delightful reward, if they may help the 
young, in this age of the Confusion of Thoughts, to 
discern some of those principles which infuse strength 
and order into men’s hearts and minds. Above all 
would I desire to suggest to my readers, how in all 
things, small as well as great, profane as well as sacred, 
it behoves us to keep our eyes fixt on the Star which led 
the Wise Men of old, and by which alone can any 
wisdom be guided, from whatsoever part of the intellec¬ 
tual globe, to a place where it will rejoice with exceeding 
great joy . 


January 6th, 1838. 


J. C. H. 







FIRST SERIES 


Xpucrov oi ditfpevoi, <firjcr\v *HpdfcAerros, yrjv noWrjv opycrcrovai, 
Kill evpivKovaiv 6\iyov. 

Clem. Alex. Strom. IV. 2. p. 565. 

As young men, when they knit and shape perfectly, do seldom grow 
to a further stature ; so knowledge, while it is in aphorisms and obser¬ 
vations, it is in growth; but when it once is comprehended in exact 
methods, it may perchance be further polished and illustrated, and 
accommodated for use and practice ; but it increaseth no more in hulk 
and substance. 


Bacon, Advancement of Learning, B. I. 









ADVERTISEMENT TO THE THIRD EDITION. 

This third edition is little else than a reprint of the 
second, with the addition of a quotation here and there 
in support of opinions previously exprest, and with the 
insertion of some half a dozen passages, partly to vindi¬ 
cate or to correct those opinions, partly to enforce them 
by reference to later events, partly to prevent their being 
misconstrued in behalf of certain errours which have 
recently become current. 

October 6th, 1847. 






GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


The virtue of Paganism was strength : the virtue of 
Christianity is obedience. 

Man without religion is the creature of circumstances : 
Religion is above all circumstances, and will lift him up above 
them. 


Moral prejudices are the stopgaps of virtue : and, as is 
the case with other stopgaps, it is often more difficult to get 
either out or in through them, than through any other part 
of the fence. 


A mother should desire to give her children a superabun¬ 
dance of enthusiasm, to the end that, after they have lost all 
they are sure to lose in’ mixing with the world, enough may 
still remain to prompt and support them through great 
actions. A cloak should be of three-pile, to keep its gloss in 
wear. 


The heart has often been compared to the needle for its 
constancy : has it ever been so for its variations ? Yet were 
any man to keep minutes of his feelings from youth to age, 
what a table of variations would they present! how nume¬ 
rous ! how diverse ! and how strange ! This is just what we 















2 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


find in the writings of Horace. If we consider his occasional 
effusions,—and such they almost all are,—as merely express¬ 
ing the* piety, or the passion, the seriousness, or the levity of 
the moment, we shall have no difficulty in accounting for 
those discrepancies in their features, which have so much 
puzzled professional commentators. Their very contradictions 
prove their truth. Or could the face even of Ninon de 
l’Enclos at seventy be just what it was at seventeen ? Nay, 
was Cleopatra before Augustus the same as Cleopatra with 
Antony? or Cleopatra with Antony the same as with the 
great Julius 1 

The teachers of youth in a free country should select those 
books for their chief study,—so far, I mean, as this world is 
concerned,—which are best adapted to foster a spirit of manly 
freedom. The duty of preserving the liberty, which our 
ancestors, through God’s blessing, won, establisht, and handed 
down to us, is no less imperative than any commandment in 
the second table ; if it be not the concentration of the whole. 
And is this duty to be learnt from the investigations of 
science ? Is it to be pickt up in the crucible 1 or extracted ; 
from the properties of lines and numbers 1 I fear there is a 
moment of broken lights in the intellectual day of civilized j 
countries, when, among the manifold refractions of Know- i 
ledge, Wisdom is almost lost sight of. Society in time breeds , 
a number of mouths, w r hich will not consent to be enter- I 
tained without a corresponding variety of dishes, so that 
unity is left alone as an inhospitable singularity ; and many 
things are got at any way, rather than a few in the right 
way. But “howsoever these things are thus in men’s 
depraved judgements and affections,” would we imbibe the 
feelings, the sentiments, and the principles, which become 1 
the inheritors of England’s name and glory, we must abide 
by the springs of which our ancestors drank. Like them, we 
must nourish our minds by contemplating the unbending 
strength of purpose and uncalculating self-devotion, which 
nerved and animated the philosophic and heroic patriots of 
the Heathen world : and we shall then blush, should Chris- 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


3 


4 

tianity, with all her additional incentives, have shone on our 
hearts without kindling a zeal as steady and as pure. 

Is not our mistress, fair Religion, 

As worthy of all our heart’s devotion, 

As Virtue was to that first blinded age ? 

As we do them in means, shall they surpass 
Us in the end ? Donne , Satires , iii. 5. 

The threatenings of Christianity are material and tangible; 
They speak of and to the senses ; because they speak of and 
to the sensual and earthly, in character, intellect, and pur¬ 
suits. The promises of Christianity on the other hand are 
addrest to a different class of persons,—to those who love, 
which comes after fear,—to those who have begun to advance 
in goodness,—to those who are already in some measure 
delivered from the thraldom of the body. But, being spoken 
of heaven to the heavenly-minded, how could they be other 
than heavenly % 

The fact then, that there is nothing definite, and little 
inviting or attractive, except to the eye of Faith, in the 
Christian representation of future bliss, instead of being a 
reasonable objection to its truth, is rather a confirmation of 
it. And so perhaps thought Selden, who remarks in his 
Table-Talk: “ The Turks tell their people of a heaven where 
there is a sensible pleasure, but of a hell where they shall 
suffer they don’t know what. The Christians quite invert this 
order : they tell us of a hell where we shall feel sensible pain, 
but of a heaven where we shall enjoy we can’t tell what.” l. 


Why should not distant parishes interchange their appren¬ 
tices 1 so that the lads on their return home might bring 
back such improvements in agriculture and the mechanical 
arts, as they may have observed or been taught during their 
absence. e. 

A practice of the sort was usual two centuries ago, and 
still exists in Germany, and other parts of the Continent. 

The first thing we learn is Meum ,, the last is Tuum. None 
can have lived among children without noticing the former 










4 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

fact; few have associated with men and not remarkt the 
latter. 


To address the prejudices of our hearers is to argue with 
them in short-hand. But it is also more : it is to invest our 
opinion with the probability of prescription, and by occupy¬ 
ing the understanding to attack the heart. 

The ancients dreaded death : the Christian can only fear 
| dying. 

A person should go out upon the water on a fine day to a 
short distance from a beautiful coast, if he would see Nature 
really smile. Never does she look so joyous, as when the 
sun is brightly reflected by the water, while the waves are 
rippling gently, and the scene receives life and animation 
here and there from the glancing transit of a row-boat, and 
the quieter motion of a few small vessels. But the land 
must be well in sight; not only for its own sake, but because 
the vastness and awfulness of a mere sea-view would ill sort 
with the other parts of the gay and glittering prospect. 

The second Punic war was a struggle between Hannibal and 
the Roman people. Its event proved that the good sense 
and spirit of a nation, when embodied in institutions, and 
exerted with perseverance, must ultimately exhaust and 
I overpower the resources of a single mind, however excellent 
| in genius and prowess. 

The war of Sertorius, the Roman Hannibal, is of the same 
kind, and teaches the same lesson. 


Nothing short of extreme necessity will induce a sensible 
man to change all his servants at once. A new set coming 
together fortuitously are sure to cross and jostle . . * like 

the Epicurean atoms, I was going $o say; but no, unlike the 
silent atoms, they have the faculty of claiming and com¬ 
plaining ; and they exert it, until the family is distracted 
with disputes about the limits of their several offices. 
















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


5 


But after a household has been set in order, there is little 
or no evil to apprehend from minor changes. A new servant 
on arriving finds himself in the middle of a system : his 
place is markt out and assigned ; the course of his business 
is set before him; and he falls into it as readily as a new 
wheel-horse to a mail, when his collar is to the pole, and the j 
coach is starting. 

It is the same with those great families, which we call 
nations. To remould a government and frame a constitution j 
anew, are works of the greatest difficulty and hazard. The 
attempt is likely to fail altogether, and cannot succeed tho¬ 
roughly under very many years. It is the last desperate 
resource of a ruined people, a staking double or quits with 
evil, and almost giving it the first game. But still it is a 
resource. We make use of cataplasms to restore suspended ! 
animation; and Burke himself might have tried Medea’s 
kettle on a carcass. 

Be that however as it may, from judicious subordinate 
reforms good, and good only, is to be lookt for. Nor are 
their benefits limited to the removal of the abuse, which 
their author designed to correct. No perpetual motion, 
God be praised! has yet been discovered for free govern¬ 
ments. For the impulse which keeps them going, they are 
indebted mainly to subordinate reforms ; now, by the ex¬ 
posure of a particular delinquency, spreading salutary 
vigilance through a whole administration; now, by the 
origination of some popular improvement from without, 
leading,—if there be any certainty in party motives, any 
such things in ambitious men as policy and emulation,—to 
the counter-adoption of numerous meliorations from within, 
which would else have been only dreamt of as impossible. 

As a little girl was playing round me one day with her ! 
white frock over her head, I laughingly called her Pishashee, 
the name which the Indians give to their white devil. The 
child was delighted with so fine a name, and ran about the 
house crying to every one she met, I am the Pishashee , I am 
the Pishashee. Would she have done so, had she been wrapt 










6 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


in black, and called witch or devil instead % No : for, as 
usual, the reality was nothing, the sound and colour every¬ 
thing. 

But how many grown-up persons are running about the 
world, quite as anxious as the little girl was to get the name 
of Pishashees ! Only she did not understand it. 

True modesty does not consist in an ignorance of our 
merits, but in a due estimate of them. Modesty then is 
only another name for self-knowledge; that is, for the 
absence of ignorance on the one subject which we ought to 
understand the best, as well from its vast importance to us, 
as from our continual opportunities of studying it. And yet 
it is a virtue. 

But what, on second thoughts, are these merits % Jeremy 
Taylor tells us, in his Life of Christ: “Nothing but the 
innumerable sins which we have added to what we have 
received. For we can call nothing ours, but such things as 
we are ashamed to own, and such things as are apt to ruin 
us. Everything besides is the gift of God ; and for a man 
to exalt himself thereon is just as if a wall on which the 
sun reflects, should boast itself against another that stands 
in the shadow.” Considerations upon Christ's Sermon on 
Humility . 

After casting a glance at our own weaknesses, how eagerly 
does our vanity console itself with deploring the infirmities 
of our friends ! t. 


It is as hard to know when one is in Paris, as when one is 
out of London. 

The first is the city of a great king; the latter, of a great 
people. M . 


When the moon, after covering herself with darkness as in 
sorrow, at last throws off the garments of her widowhood, 
she does not expose her beauty at once barefacedly to the 
eye of man, but veils herself for a time in a transparent 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


7 


cloud, till by degrees she gains courage to endure the gaze 
and admiration of beholders. 


To those whose god is honour, disgrace alone is sin. 

Some people carry their hearts in their heads ; very many 
carry their heads in their hearts. The difficulty is to keep 
them apart, and yet both actively working together. a. 

Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation, 
or of assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam- 
engine over a coalpit might be made to live. 

Philosophy, like everything else, in a Christian nation 
should be Christian. We throw away the better half of 
our means, when we neglect to avail ourselves of the 
advantages which starting in the right road gives us. It is 
idle to urge that, unless we do this, antichristians will 
deride us. Curs bark at gentlemen on horseback; but 
who, except a hypochondriac, ever gave up riding on that 
account h 


In man’s original state, before his soul had been stupefied 
by the Fall, his moral sensitiveness was probably as acute as 
his physical sensitiveness is now; so that an evil action, 
from its irreconcilableness with his nature, would have in¬ 
flicted as much pain on the mind, as a blow causes to the 
body. By the Fall this fineness of moral tact was lost;— 
Conscience, the voice of God within us, is at once its relic 
and its evidence ;—and we were left to ourselves to discover 
what is good ; though we still retain a desire of good, when 
we have made out what it consists in. 

They who disbelieve in virtue, because man has never 
been found perfect, might as reasonably deny the sun, 
because it is not always noon. 


Two persons can hardly set up their booths in the same 













8 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


quarter of Vanity Fair, without interfering with, and there¬ 
fore disliking each other. B - 

Fickleness in women of the world is the fault most likely 
to result from their condition in society. The knowing both 
what weaknesses are the most severely condemned, and what 
good qualities the most highly prized, in the female cha¬ 
racter, by our sex as well as their own, must needs render 
them desirous of pleasing generally, to the exclusion, so far 
as Nature will permit, of strong and lasting affection for 
individuals. Well! we deserve no better of them. After 
all too the flame is only smothered by society, not extin- 
guisht. Give it free air, and it will blaze. 

The following sentence is translated from D’Alembert by 
Dugald Stewart: “ The truth is, that no relation whatever 
can be discovered between a sensation in the mind, and the 
object by which it is occasioned, or at least to which we refer 
it : it does not appear possible to trace , by dint of reasoning , 
any practicable passage from the one to the other.” If this be 
so, if there be no necessary connexion between the reception 
of an object into the senses, and its impression on the mind, 
what ground have we for supposing the organs of sense to be 
more than machinery for the uses of the body ? The body 
may indeed be said to see through the eye : but how,—if 
we can trace no nearer connexion between the mind and an 
object painted on the retina, than between the mind and the 
object itself,—how can it be asserted, that the mind needs 
the eye to see with ? 

Most idle then are all disquisitions on the intermediate 
state, founded on the assumption that the soul, w T hen apart 
from the body, has no perceptions. Waller’s couplet, 

The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed, 

Lets in new lights through chinks that time has made, 

may be, perhaps is, no less true in fact, than pretty in fancy. 
Spirits may acquire new modes of communication on losing 
their mouths and ears, just as a bird gets its feathers on 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


9 

bursting from the shell. Our own experience furnishes a 
similar analogy. As the unborn infant possesses dormant 
senses, which it puts forth on coming into this world, in like 
manner our still embryo soul may perhaps have latent 
senses,—living inlets shall I call them, or capacities of 
spiritual vision and communion ?—to be exercised hereafter 
for its improvement and delight, w T hen it issues from its 
present womb, the body. 

But here a dreadful supposition crosses me. What if sin, 
which so enfeebles the understanding, and dulls the con¬ 
science, should also clog and ultimately stifle these unde- 
velopt powers and faculties, so as to render spiritual 
communion after death impossible to the wicked 1 What if 
the imbruted soul make its own prison, shut itself up from 
God, and exclude everything but the memory of its crimes, 
evil desires “baying body,” and the dread of intolerable, 
unavoidable, momentarily approaching punishment 1 At 
least it is debarred from repentance : this one thought is 
terrible enough. 

In Bacon’s noble estimate of the dignity of knowledge, in 
the first book of the Advancement of Learning , he observes 
that, “ in the election of those instruments, which it pleased 
God to use for the plantation of the faith, notwithstanding 
that at the first He did employ persons altogether unlearned, 
otherwise than by inspiration, more evidently to declare His 
immediate working, and to abase all human wisdom or know¬ 
ledge, yet nevertheless that counsel of His was no sooner 
performed, but in the next vicissitude and succession He did 
send His divine truth into the world waited on with other 
learnings, as with servants or handmaids : for so we see 
St. Paul, who w T as the only learned amongst the Apostles, 
had his pen most used in the Scriptures of the New Tes¬ 
tament.” 

From this remark let me draw a couple of corollaries : 
first, that such a man, as w r ell from his station, as from his 
acuteness, and the natural pride of a powerful and cultivated 
intellect, was the last person to become the dupe of credu- 








10 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


lous enthusiasts; especially when they were lowborn and 
illiterate. And secondly, that from this appointment we 
may draw an inference in favour of a learned ministry. If 
some of the Apostles had no other human instructor than 
the best Master that ever lived, Jesus Christ; the one most 
immediately and supernaturally called by Him to preach the 
Gospel was full of sacred and profane learning. 

It was a practice worthy of our worthy ancestors, to fill 
their houses at Christmas with their relations and friends; 
that, when Nature was frozen and dreary out of doors, some¬ 
thing might be found within doors “ to keep the pulses of 
their hearts in proper motion.” The custom however is only 
appropriate among people who happen to have hearts. It 
is bad taste to retain it in these days, when everybody worth 
hanging 

oublie sa mere, 

Et par bon ton se d6fend d’etre pere. 


Most people, it is evident, have life granted to them for 
their own sake : but not a few seem sent into the world 
chiefly for the sake of others. How many infants every 
year come and go like apparitions ! This remark too, if 
true in any degree, holds good much further. 

A critic should be a pair of snuffers. He is oftener an 
extinguisher; and not seldom a thief. u. 

The intellect of the wise is like glass : it admits the light 
of heaven, and reflects it. 

They who have to educate children, should keep in mind 
that boys are to become men, and that girls are to become 
women. The neglect of this momentous consideration gives 
us a race of moral hermaphrodites. a. 

Poetry is to philosophy what the sabbath is to the rest of 
the week. 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 11 

The ideal incentives to virtuous energy are a sort of moon 
to the moral world. Their borrowed light is but a dimmer 
substitute for the lifegiving rays of religion; replacing those 
rays, when hidden or obscured, and evidencing their 
existence, when they are unseen in the heavens. 

To exclaim then, during the blaze of devotional enthu¬ 
siasm, against the beauty and usefulness of such auxiliary 
motives, is fond. To shut the eye against their luminous 
aid, when religion does not enlighten our path, is lunatic. 
To understand their comparative worthlessness, feel their 
positive value, and turn them, as occasion arises, to account, 
is the part of the truly wise. 

I have called these incentives a sort of moon. Had the 
image occurred to one of those old writers, who took such 
pleasure in tracing out recondite analogies, he would scarcely 
have omitted to remark, that, in the conjunctions of these 
two imaginary bodies, the moral moon is never eclipst, 
except at the full, nor ever eclipses, but when it is in the 
wane. “ Love,” says our greatest living prose-writer,* in 
one of his wisest and happiest moods, “is a secondary 
passion in those who love most, a primary in those who love 
least. He who is inspired by it in a great degree, is inspired 
by honour in a greater.” So is it with Honour and Religion. 

Before me were the two Monte Cavallo statues, towering 
gigantically above the .pygmies of the present day, and 
looking like Titans in the act of threatening heaven. Over 
my head the stars were just beginning to look out, and 
might have been taken for guardian angels keeping watch 
over the temples below. Behind, and on my left, were 
palaces ; on my right, gardens, and hills beyond, with the 
orange tints of sunset over them still glowing in the 
distance. Within a stone’s throw of me, in the midst of 

* Landor, in his beautiful Conversation between Roger Ascham and Lady 
Jane Gray. The passage is all the better for its accidental coincidence 
with those noble lines by Lovelace : 

I could not love thee, dear, so much, 

Loved I not honour more. 




12 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


objects thus glorious in themselves, and thus in harmony 
with each other, was stuck an unplaned post, on which 
glimmered a paper lantern. Such is Rome. 

Many men, however ambitious to be great in great things, 
have been well content to be little in little things. a. 

Jupiter-Scapin was a happy name, witty and appropriate : 
he however for whom it was invented, was one of a large 
family. By the vulgar he is admired, and has been almost 
worshipt, as the hero of Marengo, of Austerlitz, of Jena, and 
of how many other fields of carnage : but go and read his 
will in Doctors’ Commons ; and you will find that this man- 
slayer on a huge and grand scale could also, relish murder on 
the meanest scale, and that in his solitude in St. Helena 
such malignity festered in his heart, as made him leave 
a legacy of ten thousand franks to a man for having 
attempted to assassinate the true hero, who conquered him 
at Waterloo. u. 


So great enormities have been committed by privateers, 
within the memory of living men,—as may be seen in the 
Journal of Alexander Davidson, in the Edinburgh Annual 
Register, vol. iii. p. 2,—that it seems advisable that, on board 
every such ship, except perhaps in the four seas, there 
should be a superintending national officer, to keep a public 
journal, and to prevent crimes. If the officer die on the 
cruise, the privateer should be bound to make the nearest 
friendly port, unless she meet with a national ship-of-war 
that can spare her a superintendent out of its crew. A 
privateer not conforming to the regulations on these points 
should be deemed a pirate. 

Unless some such provisions are adopted, the States now 
springing up in America will one day send forth a swarm of 
piratical privateers, cruel as the Buccaneers, and more 
unprincipled. 


A statesman may do much for commerce, most by leaving 
it alone. A river never flows so smoothly, as when it 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 13 

follows its own course, without either aid or check. Let it 
make its own bed : it will do so better than you can. a. 

Anguish is so alien to man’s spirit, that nothing is more 
difficult to will than contrition. Therefore God is good 
enough to afflict us, that our hearts, being brought low 
enough to feed on sorrow, may the more easily sorrow for 
sin unto repentance. 

In most ruins we see what Time has spared. Ancient 
Rome appears to have defied him; and its remains are the 
limbs which he has rent and scattered in the struggle. t. 


How melancholy are all memorials ! t. 

Were we merely the creatures of outward impulses, what 
would faces of joy be but so many glaciers, on which the 
seeming smile of happiness at sunrise is only a flinging back 
of the rays they appear to be greeting, from frozen and 
impassive heads ? 

It is with flowers, as with moral qualities : the bright 
are sometimes poisonous; but, I believe, never the sweet. 

Picturesqueness is that quality in objects which fits them 
for making a good picture ; and it refers to the appearances 
of things in form and colour, more than to their accidental 
associations. Rembrandt would have been right in painting 
turbans and Spanish cloaks, though the Cid had been a 
scrivener, Cortez had sold sugar, and Mahomet had been 
notorious for setting up a drug-shop instead of a religion. 

It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is 
slower and harder than loss, in all things good : but, in all 
things bad, getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of. 

Would you cure or kill an evil prejudice ? Manage it as 
you would a pulling horse ; tickle it as you would a trout; 












14 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


treat it as you would the most headstrong thing in the 
world, and the readiest to take alarm, the likeliest to slip 
through your fingers at the moment you think you have got 
it safe, and are j ust about to make an end of it. 

Three reasons occur to me for thinking bodily sins more 
curable than mental ones. 

In the first place they are more easily ascertained to be 
sins; since they clothe themselves in outward acts, which 
admit neither of denial, nor, except in way of excuse, of 
self-deception. Nobody, the morning after he has been 
drunk, can be ignorant that he went to bed not sober : his 
nerves and stomach assure him of the fact. But the same 
man might be long in finding out that he thinks more highly 
of himself than he ought to think, from having no palpable 
standard to convince him of it. 

Secondly bodily sins do not so immediately affect the 
reason, but that we still possess an uncorrupted judge within 
us, to discover and proclaim their criminality. Whereas 
mental sins corrupt the faculty appointed to determine on 
their guilt, and darken the light which should shew their 
darkness. 

Moreover bodily sins must be connected with certain 
times and places. Consequently, by a new arrangement of 
hours, and by abstaining, so far as may be, from the places 
which have ministered opportunities to a bodily vice, a man 
may in some degree disable himself for committing it. This 
in most vices of the kind is easy, in sloth not; which is 
therefore the most dangerous of them, or at least the hardest 
to be cured. The mind on the other hand is its own place, 
and does not depend on contingencies of season and situation 
for the power of indulging its follies or its passions. 

Still it must be remembered that bodily sins breed mental 
ones, thus, after they are stifled or extinct, leaving an evil 
and vivacious brood behind them. “ Nothing grows weak 
with age (says South, vol. ii. p. 47), but that which will at 
length die with age ; which sin never does. The longer the 
blot continues, the deeper it sinks. Vice, in retreating from 







GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


15 


the practice of men, retires into their fancy” . . . and from 
that stronghold what shall drive it 1 


’Twas a night clear and cloudless, and the sight, 

Swifter than heaven-commissioned cherubim, 

Soaring above the moon, glancing beyond 
The stars, was lost in heaven’s abysmal blue. 

There are things the knowledge of which proves their 
revelation. The mind can no more penetrate into the 
secrets of heaven, than the eye can force a way through the 
clouds. It is only when they are withdrawn by a mightier 
hand, that the sight can rise beyond the moon, and, ascend¬ 
ing to the stars, repose on the unfathomable ether,—that 
emblem of omnipresent Deity, which, everywhere enfolding 
and supporting man, yet baffles his senses, and is unper¬ 
ceived, except when he looks upward and contemplates it 
above him. 


It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. 
Could we understand half what most mothers say and do to 
their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own 
importance, which would render us insupportable through 
life. Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking non¬ 
sense to him, before he is old enough to know the sense 
of it! 


A man who strives earnestly and perseveringly to convince 
others, at least convinces us that he is convinced himself. R. 

It has been objected to the Reformers, that they dwelt too 
much on the corruption of our nature. But surely, if our 
strength is to be perfected, it can only be “ in weakness.” 
He who feels his fall from Paradise the most sorely, will be 
the most grateful for the offer of returning thither on the 
wings of the Redeemer’s love. 


Written on Whitsunday. 

Who has not seen the sun on a fine spring morning 















16 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


pouring his rays through a transparent white cloud, filling 
all places with the purity of his presence, and kindling the 
birds into joy and song ? Such, I conceive, would be the 
constant effects of the Holy Spirit on the soul, were there 
no evil in the world. As it is, the moral sun, like the 
natural, though “ it always makes a day,” is often clouded 
over. It is only under a combination of peculiarly happy 
circumstances, that the heart suffers this sweet violence per¬ 
ceptibly, and feels and enjoys the ecstasy of being borne 
along by overpowering, unresisted influxes of good. To 
most, I fear, this happens only during the spring of life: but 
some hearts keep young, even at eighty. 

After listening to very fine music, it appears one of the 
hardest problems, how the delights of heaven can be so 
attempered to our perceptions, as to become endurable for 
their pain. 

A speech, being a matter of adaptation, and having to win 
opinions, should contain a little for the few, and a great deal 
for the many. Burke hurt his oratory by neglecting the 
latter half of this rule, as Sheridan must have spoilt his by 
his carelessness about the former. But the many always 
carry it for the moment against the few \ and though Burke 
was allowed to be the greater man, Sheridan drew most 
hearers. 

“ I am convinced that jokes are often accidental. A man, 
in the course of conversation, throws out a remark at 
random, and is as much surprised as any of the company, on 
hearing it, to find it witty.” 

For the substance of this observation I am indebted to 
one of the pleasantest men I ever knew, who was doubtless 
giving the results of his own experience. He might have 
carried his remark some steps further, with ease and profit. 
It would have done our pride no harm to be reminded, how 
few of our best and wisest, and even of our newest thoughts, 
do really and wholly originate in ourselves, how few of them 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


17 


are voluntary, or at least intentional. Take away all that 
has been suggested or improved by the hints and remarks of 
others, all that has fallen from us accidentally, all that has 
been struck out by collision, all that has been prompted by 
a sudden impulse, or has occurred to us when least looking 
for it ) and the remainder, which alone can be claimed as 
the fruit of our thought and study, will in every man form 
a small portion of his store, and in most men will be little 
worth preserving. We can no more make thoughts than 
seeds. How absurd then for a man to call himself a poet, 
or maker ! The ablest writer is a gardener first, and then a 
cook. His tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his 
strongest and most nutritive thoughts, and, when they are 
ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and so that they may have 
a relish. 

To recur to my friend’s remark : let me strengthen it 
with the authority of one of the wittiest men that ever 
lived; who, if any man, might assuredly have boasted that 
his wit was not a foundling, “ As the repute of wisdom, 
(says South, Sermon viii), so that of wit also is very casual. 
Sometimes a lucky saying or a pertinent reply has procured 
an esteem of wit to persons otherwise very shallow ; so that, 
if such a one should have the ill hap to strike a man dead 
with a smart saying, it ought in all reason and conscience to 
be judged but a chance-medley. Nay, even when there is a 
real stock of wit, yet the wittiest sayings and sentences will 
be found in a great measure the issues of chance, and nothing 
else but so many lucky hits of a roving fancy. For consult 
the acutest poets and speakers; and they will confess that 
their quickest and most admired conceptions were such as 
darted into their minds like sudden flashes of lightning, they 
knew not how nor whence ; and not by any certain con¬ 
sequence or dependence of one thought upon another.” 

Were further confirmation needed, the poet of our age has 
been heard to declare, that once in his life he fancied he had 
hit upon an original thought, but that after a while he met 
with it in so common an author as Boyle. 








18 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Whoever wishes to see an emblem of political unions and 
enmities, should walk, when the sun shines, in a shrubbery. 
So long as the air is quite still, the shadows combine to form 
a pretty trellice-work, which looks as if it would be lasting. 
But the wind is perverse enough to blow; and then to 
pieces goes the trellice-work in an instant; and the shadows, 
which before were so quiet and distinct, cross and intermingle 
confusedly. It seems impossible they should ever re-unite : 
yet, the moment the wind subsides, they dovetail into each 
other as closely as before. 

Before I traveled, I had no notion that mountain scenery 
was so unreal. Beside the strangeness of finding common 
objects on new levels, and hence in new points of view, you 
have only to get into a retired nook, and you hear water, 
and catch a glimpse of the tops of trees, but see nothing 
distinctly except the comer of rock where you are standing. 
You are surrounded by a number of well-known effects, so 
completely severed to the eye and imagination from their 
equally well-known and usually accompanying causes, that 
you cannot tell what to make of them. 


All things here are strange! 

Rocks scarred like rough-hewn wood ! Ice brown as sand 
Wet by the tide, and cleft, with depths between, 

And streams outgushing from its frozen feet! 

Snow-bridges arching over headlong torrents ! 

And then the sightless sounds, and noiseless motions, 
Which hover round us ! I should dream I dreamt, 

But for those looks of kindness still unchanged. 


0 these mob torrents ! here, with show of fury, 
Rushing submissive to an arch of snow, 

That frailest fancy-work of Nature’s idlesse ; 
There threatening rocks, and rending ancient firs, 
The sovereins of the wood, yet overwhelmed, 

And dasht to the earth with hooting violence. 


Many actions, like the Bhone, have two sources, one pure, 
the other impure. 


It is with great men as with high mountains. They 

















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


19 


oppress ns with awe when we stand nnder them : they 
disappoint onr insatiable imaginations when we are nigh, but 
not quite close to them : and then, the further we recede 
from them, the more astonishing they appear; until their 
bases being concealed by intervening objects, they at one 
moment seem miraculously lifted above the earth, and the 
next strike our fancies as let down from heaven. 


The apparent and the real progress of human affairs are 
both well illustrated in a waterfall; where the same noisy, 
bubbling eddies continue for months and years, though the 
water which froths in them changes every moment. But as 
every drop in its passage tends to loosen and detach some 
particle of the channel, the stream is working a change all 
the time in the appearance of the fall, by altering its bed, 
and so subjecting the river during its descent to a new set of 
percussions and reverberations. 

And what, when at last effected, is the consequence of this 
change % The foam breaks into shapes somewhat different: 
but the noise, the bubbling, and the eddies are just as violent 
as before. 


A little management may often evade resistance, which a 
vast force might vainly strive to overcome. a. 

Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and 
changeable : they even dance : yet God has made them part 
of the oak. In so doing He has given us a lesson not to 
deny the stout-heartedness within, because we see the light¬ 
someness without. 

How disproportionate are men’s projects and means ! To 
raise a single church to a single Apostle, the monuments of 
antiquity were ransackt, and forgiveness of sins was doled 
out at a price. Yet its principal gate has been left unfinisht ; 
and its holy of holies is encrusted with stucco, 


On entering St. Peter’s, my first impulse was to throw 












20 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

myself on my knees ; and, but for the fear of being observed 
by my companions, I must have bowed my face to the 
ground, and kist the pavement. I moved slowly up the 
nave, opprest by my own littleness; and when at last I 
reacht the brazen canopy, and my spirit sank within me 
beneath the sublimity of the dome, I felt that, as the ancient 
Romans could not condemn Manlius within sight of the 
Capitol, so it would be impossible for an Italian of the 
present day to renounce Popery under the dome of St 
Peter’s, 


The impressions produced by an object which addresses 
itself to the understanding and the heart by a number of 
conflicting associations, will probably vary much, even in the 
same mind, under different aspects of moral light and shade : 
nor do I believe that there is any real discrepancy between 
my own feelings and my brother’s, when I say that the 
hollowness and fraud of Popery were never brought before 
my mind more forcibly, nay, glaringly, than beneath the 
dome of St Peter’s. One of my first visits to that gorgeous 
cathedral was on Christmasday 1832. I expected to see a 
sight agreeing, at least in outward appearance, with the title 
of Catholic, which the Church of Rome claims as exclusively 
her own,—to find a multitude of persons thronging in from 
the city and from the neighbouring country to attend the 
celebration of high mass on that blessed festival by him 
whom they were taught to revere as Christ’s vicegerent upon 
earth. But instead of this a row of soldiers was drawn up 
along each side of the nave, and kept everybody at a 
distance during the whole service, except the few who were 
privileged by station or favour to enter within the lines. 
Beside the altar, under the dome, seats had been erected for 
persons of rank or wealth, who were mainly foreiners, and 
consequently in great part English or German Protestants. 
Thus the whole proceeding acquired the character, not of a 
religious ceremony, in which the congregation was to join, 
but of a theatrical exhibition before strangers, regarded, for 
the most part, as heretics, and many of whom came merely 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 21 

out of curiosity to see the show. After a while the Pope 
was brought in, borne on a raised seat or palanquin, with 
splendid robes and plumes and fans and other paraphernalia. 
He celebrated mass, the persons who ought to have formed 
the congregation, a very scanty one at the utmost, being 
prevented from approaching by the barrier of troops : and 
when the rite was over, the chief performer, or chief victim, 
in this miserable pageant was carried out again with the 
same pomp. The thought of the moral debasement thus 
inflicted on a man, who personally might be honest and 
pious, and of his utter inability to struggle against such a 
crushing system, so opprest me as I walkt away, that when, 
in mounting the steps before the Trinita, my eyes fell on a 
poor beggar who used to sit there, and who had neither 
hands nor feet, picking up the alms thrown to him with his 
mouth, I could not refrain from exclaiming, How infinitely 
rather would I be that poor cripple , than Pope ! 

Can the effect of the ceremonies in St Peter’s on intelligent 
Italians in these days be very different 1 I doubt it; 
whatever might be their feelings when they merely saw the 
empty shell of the building. I have known men indeed, 
whom I esteem and honour, and who have regarded Rome as 
a solemn and majestic witness of what they have deemed 
the Truth. But to me, though, from the indescribable 
beauty and grandeur of many of the views, the intense 
interest of its Heathen and Christian recollections, and its 
inexhaustible stores of ancient and modern art, the three 
months I spent there were daily teeming with fresh sources 
of delight, and have left a love such as I never felt for any 
other city, yet when I thought of Rome in connexion with 
the religion, of which it is the metropolis, it seemed to me of 
all places the last where a man with his eyes open could be 
converted to Romanism. In the Tyrol, I could have under¬ 
stood how a person living amongst its noble and devout 
inhabitants might have been led to embrace their faith, but 
not at Rome. The vision of the Romish Church, and of its 
action upon the people, which was there graven on my mind, 
accords with that implied in the answer of an ingenious 



22 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

English painter, whom I askt, how he could bring himself to 
leave Rome, after living so many years there. It was indeed 
very painful, he replied, to tear myself away from so much 
exquisite beauty: but, as my children grew up, it became 
absolutely necessary ; for I found it utterly impossible to give 
them a notion of truth at Rome. The terrible curse, which is 
represented in the words of the ancient satirist,— Quid 
Romae faciam ? mentiri nesdo, —seems still to cleave to the 
fateful city. u. 

The germ of idolatry is contained in the proneness of 
man’s feelings and imagination to take their impressions 
from outward objects, rather than from the dictates of rea¬ 
son ; under the controll of which they can scarcely be brought 
without a great impairing of their energies. 

It may possibly have been in part from a merciful indul¬ 
gence to this tendency of our nature, that God vouchsafed to 
shew Himself in the flesh. At least one may discern traces 
which seem to favour such a belief, both in the Jewish scheme 
and in the Christian. In both God revealed Himself palpably 
to the outward senses of His people : in both He addrest 
Himself personally by acts of loving-kindness to their affec¬ 
tions. It is not merely for being redeemed, that we are 
called on to feel thankful; but for being redeemed by the 
blood of the God-man Jesus Christ, which He poured out for 
us upon the Cross. So it was not simply as God, that Jehovah 
was to be worshipt by the Jews; but as the God of their 
fathers, who had brought them out of the house of bondage, 
whose voice they had heard and lived, who had chosen them 
to be His people, and had given them His laws, and a land 
flowing with milk and honey. 

The last sentence has suggested a query of some import¬ 
ance. Out of the house of bondage. What says the advocate 
of colonial slavery to this ? That the bondage was no evil '] 
that the deliverance of a people from personal slavery was 
not a work befitting God’s right hand 1 Or will he tell us 
that the cases differ ? that the animal wants of the Israelites 
were ill attended to 1 that they were ill fed ? This at least 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 23 

will not serve his purpose : for the fleshpots of Egypt are 
proverbial. What will serve it, I leave him to discover ; only 
recommending him to beware of relying much on the order 
to expose the Hebrew children. If he does, it will give way 
under him. Meanwhile to those religious men who are 
labouring for the emancipation of the Negroes, amid the 
various doubts and difficulties with which every great political 
measure is beset, it must needs be an inspiring thought, that 
to rescue a race of men from personal slavery, and raise them 
to the rank and self-respect of independent beings is, in the 
strictest sense of the word, a god-like task ; inasmuch as it 
is a task which, God’s Book tells us, God Himself has accom- 
plisht. j But these things , as St. Paul says, expressly speaking 
of the Pentateuch, happened for examples , and were written 
for our admonition. 


Often would the lad 

Watch with sad fixedness the summer sun 
In bloodred blaze sink hero-like to rest. 

Then, 0 to set like thee / but 7, alas ! 

Am weak , a poor, unheeded shepherd boy* 

’Twas that alas undid him. His ambition, 

Once the vague instinct of his nobleness, 

Thus tempered in the glowing furnace-heat 
Of lone repinings and aye-present aims, 

Brightened to hope, and hardened to resolve. 

To hope ! What hope is that whose clearest ray 
Is drencht with mother’s tears ? what that resolve, 

Whose strength is crime, whose instrument is death ? 

There is something melancholy and painful in the entire 
abandonment of any institution designed for good. It is too 
plain a confession of intellectual weakness, too manifest a 
receding before the brute power of outward things. Any 
one can amputate : the difficulty and the object is to restore. 
To reanimate lifeless forms,—to catch their departed spirit, 
and embody it in another shape,—in the room of institutions 
grown obsolete, to substitute such new ones as will mould, 
sway, and propell the existing mass of thought and character, 

* Since these lines were written, a fine passage, expressing the feelings 
with which an ambitious lad sits watching the setting sun, has been 
pointed out to me in Schiller’s Robbers. 





24 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

and thus do for the present age, what the old in their vigour 
did for the past,—these are things worth living a politician’s 
life for, with all its labours and disgusts. Did that alone 
suffice, who would live any other ? But to accomplish these 
things, the most dextrous mastery of the art is requisite, 
guided by the brightest illuminations of the science : and 
where is the man with both these, when so few have either ? 

Quicquid credam valde credo , must be the motto of every 
true poet. His belief is of the heart, not of the head, 
and springs from himself, much more than from the 
object. 

It is curious that we express personality and unity by the 
same symbol. 

Is there any country in which polygamy is more frequent 
than in England ? 

In some cases the mistress has been so much a wife, it only 
remains for the wife to be a mistress. 

Yet, strictly speaking, it is just as impossible for any but 
a wife to be a wife, as for any but a wife to be a mother. 
And wisdom cries, through the lips of a great French philo¬ 
sopher, “ N’en croyez pas les romans : il faut etre Spouse 
pour etre mere.” Bonald, Pensees , p. 97. 

Xerxes promist a great reward to the inventer of a new 
pleasure. What would he not promise in our days to the 
inventer of a new incident? Fancy and Chance have long 
since come to an end, the one of its combinations, the other 
of its legerdemain. 

Now the huge hook of faery-land lies closed ; 

And those strong brazen clasps will yield no more. 

But since the fictitious sources of poetry are thus as it 
were drunk up, is poetry to fail with them ? If not, from 
whence is it to be supplied ? From the inexhaustible springs 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


25 


of truth and feeling, which are ever gurgling and boiling up 
in the caverns of the human heart. 


It is an uncharitable errour to ascribe the delight, with 
which unpoetical persons often speak of a mountain-tour, to 
affectation. The delight is as real as mutton and beef, with 
which it has a closer connexion than the travelers themselves 
suspect,—arising in great measure from the good effects of 
mountain air, regular exercise, and wholesome diet, upon the 
spirits. This is sensual indeed, though not improperly so : 
but it is no concession to the materialist. I do not deny 
that my neighbour has a soul, by referring a particular plea¬ 
sure in him to the body. 

Poetry should be an alterative : modern playwrights have 
converted it into a sedative ; which they administer in such 
unseasonable quantities, that, like an overdose of opium, it 
makes one sick. 


Time is no agent, as some people appear to think, that it 
should accomplish anything of itself. Looking at a heap of 
stones for a thousand years will do no more toward building a 
house of them, than looking at them for a moment. For 
Time, when applied to works of any kind, being only a suc¬ 
cession of relevant acts, each furthering the work, it is clear 
that even an infinite succession of irrelevant and therefore 
inefficient acts would no more achieve or forward the comple¬ 
tion, than an infinite number of jumps on the same spot 
would advance a man toward his journey’s end. There is a 
motion without progress in time as well as in space ; where 
a thing often remains stationary, which appears to us to 
recede, while we are leaving it behind. 

A sort of ostracism is continually going on against the 
best, both of men and measures. Hence the good are fain 
to purchase the acquiescence of the bad, by contenting them¬ 
selves with the second, third, or even fourth best, according 
as they can make their bargain. 









26 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Courage, when it is not heroic self-sacrifice, is sometimes a 
modification, and sometimes a result of faith. How vast a 
field then is opened to man, by establishing faith and its 
modifications upon the power and truth of God ! Had this 
great Gospel virtue (which, as the New Testament philoso¬ 
phically affirms, has power to remove mountains) been really 
and extensively operative, what highth or perfection might 
we not have reacht 1 As the apparent impossibilities, which 
check man’s exertions, vanisht, his views would have enlarged 
in proportion : so that, considering how the removal of a 
single obstacle will often disclose unimagined paths, and open 
the way to undreamt of advances, our wishes might perhaps 
afford a surer measure even than our hopes, for calculating 
the progress of man under the impulse of this master prin¬ 
ciple. Who, twenty years ago, notwithstanding the Vicar of 
Wakefield, thought that practicable, which Mrs. Fry has 
shewn to be almost easy 1 

From a narrow notion of human duty, men imagine that 
the devout and social affections are the only qualities stunted 
by want of faith. Were it so, we should not have to deplore 
that narrow sphere of knowledge, that dearth of heroic 
enterprise, that scarcity of landmarks and pinnacles in virtue, 
for which cowardly man has to thank his distrust of what he 
can accomplish, God assisting. We could in no wise have 
had more than one discoverer of America; but we should 
then have been blest with many Columbuses. So Bacon 
teaches in his Essay on Atheism: “ Take an example of a 
dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on, 
when he finds himself maintained by a man, who to him is 
instead of a god, or melior natura ; which courage is mani¬ 
festly such, as that creature, without that confidence of a 
better nature than his own, could never attain. So man, 
when he resteth and assureth himself upon divine protection 
and favour, gathereth a force and faith, which human nature 
in itself could not obtain. Therefore, as atheism is in all 
respects hateful, so it is especially in this, that it destroys 
magnanimity, and depriveth human nature of the means to 
exalt itself above human frailty.” 



GUESSES AT TRUTH. 27 

But I may be told perhaps that, although this is spoken 
most truly against atheism, no such thing as atheism is to be 
found now ; and I may be askt, Who are atheists ? I answer, 
with sorrow and awe, Practically every man is an atheist, who 
lives without God in the world. 


Friendship is Love, without either flowers or veil. 

Juliet’s flow of feeling is a proof of her purity. 

As oftentimes, when walking in a wood near sunset, 
though the sun himself be hid by the highth and bushiness 
of the trees around, yet we know that he is still above the 
horizon, from seeing his beams in the open glades before us, 
illumining a thousand leaves, the several brightnesses of which 
are so many evidences of his presence ; thus it is with the 
Holy Spirit. He works in secret; but his work is manifest 
in the lives of all true Christians. Lamps so heavenly must 
have been lit from on high. 

As the Epicureans had a Deism without a God, so the 
Unitarians have a Christianity without a Christ, and a Jesus 
but no Saviour. 

Christian prudence passes for a want of worldly courage ; 
just as Christian courage is taken for a want of worldly 
prudence. But the two qualities are easily reconciled. 
When we have outward circumstances to contend with, what 
need we fear, God being with us? When we have sin and 
temptation to contend with, what should we not fear ? God 
leaving our defense to our own hearts, which at the first 
attack surrender to the enemy, and go over at the first 
solicitation. 

Of Christian courage I have just spoken. On Christian 
prudence it is well said, that he who loves danger shall 'perish 
by it. “ He who will fight the devil at his own weapon, 
must not wonder if he finds him an overmatch.” South, 
Sermon lxv,_ 









28 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Mark how the moon athwart yon snowy waste 
An instant glares on us, then hides her head, 

Curtained in thickest clouds, while half her orb 
Hangs on the horizon like an urn of fire. 

That too diminishes, drawn up toward heaven 
By some invisible hand : and now ’tis gone : 

And nought remains to man, but anxious thoughts, 

Why one so beautiful should frown on him, 

With painful longings for a gift resumed, 

And the aching sense that something has been lost. 

Light will blind a man, sooner than darkness. Are we 
then to pray that we may be left in darkness 'i 0 no! but 
beware, ye who walk in light, lest ye turn your light into a 
curse. A. 

Plan for the Alleviation of the Poor-rates , written in 1826. 

I entreat every one who does not see the grievous evil of 
the Poorlaws, as now administered, or who doubts the neces¬ 
sity of applying some strong remedy, to read the article on 
those laws in the 66th number of the Quarterly Review. 
It is written professedly in their defense : yet, unless with 
Malachi Malagrowther I called them a canter, I could say 
nothing severer than is there said against their present 
administration, and its effects and tendencies; which the 
writer refers to the act passed in 1795, “enabling overseers 
to relieve poor persons at their own homes." For nearly a 
century before, the Poor-rates had fluctuated little. In the 
thirty-one years since, they have risen from two to six 
millions; and if no measures are taken to stop the evil, they 
must still go on increasing. “Yet (as the Reviewer says) 
the direct savings which would accrue from a better system 
of supporting the poor, are not worth consideration, when 
contrasted with the indirect advantages, from the melioration 
of the character and habits of the agricultural labourer.” 

Almost every man in England is affected by this evil 
system; almost every man, except the farmers, who are the 
loudest in their complaints, is directly injured by it; the 
poor most. Let them then, to use their own phrase, know 
the rights of the matter. Shew them how great, how 
important a part of the system, as it now exists, is quite 





GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


29 


new. Appeal to their own experience, whether it is not most 
pernicious. Half the difficulty which impedes an alteration 
of the Poorlaws, will be at an end. 

The repeal of the Act of 1795 may do a good deal, 
especially for the payers of Poor-rates. But I am disposed 
to go much further ; not from hard-heartedness, or a dis¬ 
regard for the happiness and welfare of the honest and 
industrious poor of this land; but from a belief that, after 
a few years, when the evil effects of the present system are 
worn out of the character and habits of the English labourer, 
his condition would be improved by a complete change in 
our system of legal charity. 

Old age is the only period of a poor man’s life, when, if 
honest and industrious, he would not be sorry to owe his 
regular support to any hands except his own. Now in old 
age his comforts would be augmented, and, what is of still 
more consequence to him, his respectability would be increast, 
—he would be a richer man, a more independent man, a 
man of greater weight in the village,—from the adoption of 
some regulations of this sort. 

Let a fund be establisht for the benefit of the poor, to be 
called the National Poor-fund. Out of this fund, every 

labourer (paying the sum of.weekly, from the time he 

is sixteen till he is.) shall at the age of sixty-five 

be entitled to receive the third of a hale labourer’s average 
wages. That third at the end of four years is to be doubled ; 
and at the end of eight years tripled. Thus at seventy- 
three the labourer, if he live so long, will be entitled of right 
to receive the full amount of a healthy labourer’s wages. 

The poor of large towns and manufacturers, I conceive, 
are shorter-lived than peasants. If so, they should be 
entitled to the benefits of the National Poor-fund earlier. 
The trifle to be paid weekly both by them and by the agri¬ 
cultural labourers should be less, perhaps considerably 
less, than what would be demanded by an Insurance-office 
guaranteeing the same prospective advantages. 

Occasional distress may safely be left to private charity. 
Consequently there need not be any temporary relief; nor 










30 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

should there, as that would reopen a door to all the present 
evils. There should also be few poor-houses. Orphans, and 
occasionally the aged, in country parishes might be boarded 
out, (as is, or was, the custom at Lyons with the foundlings, 
who, instead of being reared in the hospital, were put out to 
nurse,) due care being taken to place the orphans with 
cottagers of good repute. But a subscriber to the fund, if 
disabled by an accident, might at any age claim relief from 
it apportioned to his maimedness. 

Persons who had not contributed to the fund in their 
youth, would receive no relief from it in old age. Contri¬ 
butions for less than.years should be forfeited : but 

every man, paying his dues for that number of years, and 
then discontinuing his contribution, should be entitled to 
relief proportionate. Whether he should begin to receive at 
sixty-five, only receiving less weekly, or should begin to 
receive aid later, is a question I am not prepared to answer. 
Perhaps the latter would be the better plan in most cases. 

Of women I say nothing : but it would be easy to form a 
liberal scale,—and liberal it should be,—for them. Only I 
would allow contributors, who die without benefiting by the 
fund, to bequeathe to women who are, or to female infants 
provided they become, contributors, the amount of one year’s 

contribution for every.during which the testator may 

have contributed ; such amount being carried to the account 
of the legatee, exactly as if she had paid it herself. 

To increase this Poor-fund, either a parliamentary grant 
should be voted yearly, or,—what would be far better, and 
should therefore be tried in the first instance,—the rich 
should come forward as honorary subscribers. Nay, every 
one without exception should belong to it, either as sub¬ 
scriber or contributor. It is the littles of the little that 
make the mickle. 

Of the contributors I have spoken already. For sub¬ 
scribers the following yearly proportion, or something like it, 
would suffice : one pound for all who in any way have sixty 
pounds a year ; two for all who have a hundred ; and so on. 
Only there should be a maximum, and that not a large one ; 





GUESSES AT TRUTH. 31 

so that in rich families the wife might subscribe as well as 
the husband. All persons now liable to be rated should put 
in a trifle for every child above six or seven years old : this 
in the case of the wealthy should be as much or nearly so, 
as they put in for themselves. Moreover all masters should 
take care that their servants are subscribers, making them 
an allowance on purpose. In return for this they should be 
admitted to relief in old age, as they would now be, on 
making out a case of necessity. But only bond fide working 
persons should be entitled to receive of right, as contributors 
to the fund; who are carefully to be distinguisht from the 
subscribers in aid of it. 

The Jacobins, in realizing their systems of fraternization, 
always contrived to be the elder brothers. l. 


—-I rise 

From a perturbed sleep, broken by dreams 
Of long and desperate conflict hand to hand, 

Of wounds, and rage, and hard-earned victory, 

And charging over falling enemies 

With shouts of joy . . . How quiet is the night ! 

The trees are motionless ; the cloudless blue 
Sleeps in the firmament; the thoughtful moon, 

With her attendant train of circling stars, 

Seems to forget her journey through the heavens, 

To gaze upon the beauties of the scene. 

That scene how still! no truant breeze abroad 
To mar its quietness. The very brook, 

So wont to prattle like a merry child, 

Now creeps with caution o’er its pebbled way, 

As if afraid to violate the silence. 

Handsomeness is the more animal excellence, beauty the 
more imaginative. A handsome Madonna I cannot conceive, 
and never saw a handsome Yenus : but I have seen many a 
handsome country girl, and a few very handsome ladies. 

There would not be half the difficulty in doing right, but 
for the frequent occurrence of cases where the lesser virtues 
are on the side of wrong. 

Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope. 










32 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Since the generality of persons act from impulse, much 
more than from principle, men are neither so good nor so 
bad as we are apt to think them. 

There is an honest unwillingness to pass off another’s 
observations for our own, which makes a man appear 
pedantic. 

Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerint /... Immo vivant! 
provided they are worthy to live. So may we have the 
satisfaction of knowing,—what literary incentive can be 
greater ?—that we too have been permitted to utter sacred 
words, and to think the thoughts of great minds. 

The commentator guides and lights us to the altar erected 
by the author; but he himself must already have kindled 
his torch at the flame which burns upon it. And what are 
Aid and Science, if not a running commentary on Nature % 
what are poets and philosophers, but torchbearers leading us 
through the mazes and recesses of God’s two majestic 
temples, the sensible and the spiritual world % Books, as 
Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read 
Nature. Eschylus and Aristotle, Shakspeare and Bacon, are 
priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and 
the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what 
we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the 
senses. Do you not, since you have read Wordsworth, feel 
a fresh and more thoughtful delight, whenever you hear a 
cuckoo, whenever you see a daisy, whenever you play with a 
child % Have not Thucydides and Machiavel aided you in 
discovering the tides of feeling and the currents of passion 
by which events are borne along the ocean of Time 1 Can 
you not discern something more in man, now that you look 
at him with eyes purged and unsealed by gazing upon 
Shakspeare and Dante f From these terrestrial and celestial 
globes we learn the configuration of the earth and the 
heavens. 

But wheresoever good is done, good is received in return. 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 33 

The law of reciprocation is not confined to the physical 
system of things : in the career of benevolence and bene¬ 
ficence also every action is followed by a corresponding 
reaction. Intellectual light is not poured from a lantern, 
leaving the bearer in the shade : it supplies us with the 
power of beholding and contemplating the luminary it flows 
from. The more familiar we become with Nature, with the 
greater veneration and love do we return to the masters by 
whom we were initiated; and as they have taught us to 
understand Nature, Nature in turn teaches us to understand 
them. 

“When I have been traveling in Italy (says a lively 
modern writer), how often have I exclaimed, How like a 
;picture ? I remember once, while watching a glorious 
sunset from the banks of the Arno, I caught myself saying, 
This is truly one of Claude's sunsets . Now when I again see 
one of my favorite Grosvenor Claudes, I shall probably 
exclaim, How natural! how like what I have seen so often on 
the Arno , or from the Monte Pincio /” Journal of an En- 
nuyee , p. 33 5. 

The same thing must have happened to most lovers of 
landscape-painting. How often in the Netherlands does one 
see Cuyp’s solid, oppressive sunshine ! and Rubenses bound¬ 
less, objectless plains, which no other painter would have 
deemed either worthy or susceptible of being transferred 
from Nature’s Gallery to Art’s ! More than once, in mount¬ 
ing the hill of Fiesole to Landor’s beautiful villa, have I 
stopt with my companion to gaze on that pure, living ether, 
in which Perugino is wont to enshrine his Virgins and Saints, 
and which till then I had imagined to be a heavenly vision 
specially vouchsafed to him, such as this world of cloud and 
mist could not parallel. Many a time too among the Sussex 
downs have I felt grateful to Copley Fielding for opening 
my eyes to see beauties and harmonies, which else might 
have been unheeded, and for breathing ideas into the 
prospect, whereby “the repose Of earth, sky, sea, and air 
was vivified.” 

Hence we may perceive, why what is called a taste for the 


D 









34 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


picturesque never arises in a country, until it has reacht an 
advanced stage of intellectual culture : because an eye for 
the picturesque can only be formed by looking at pictures ; 
that is, primarily. In this, as in other cases, by Art are we 
first led to fix our attention and reflexion more observantly 
on the beauties of Nature : although, when such attention 
and reflexion have once become general, they may be excited 
in such as have never seen a picture. When we are told 
therefore that the earliest passages to be found in any ancient 
j author, which savour of what we should now call poetical 
I description, are in the Epistles of Pliny, we must not infer 
from this that Pliny had a livelier and intenser love of 
Nature than any of the ancient poets. Supposing the 
j remark to be correct,—and I will not stop to enquire how 
| far it is so,—all it would prove is, that Pliny was, as we know 
I him to have been, what we used to call a virtuoso , a picture- 
fancier, and that people in his day were beginning to look at 
Nature in the mirror of Art. It is a mistake however to 
I conclude that men are insensible to those beauties, which 
they are not continually talking about and analysing,—that 
the love of Nature is a new feeling, because the taste for 
the Picturesque is a modern taste. When the mountaineer 
descends into the plain, he soon begins to pine with love for 
his native hills ; and many have been known to fall sick, nay, 
even to die, of that love. Yet, had he never left them, you 
would never have heard him prate about them. When I 
j was on the Lake of Zug, which lies bosomed among such 
grand mountains, the boatman, after telling some stories 
about SuwaiTow’s march through the neighbourhood, askt 
me, Is it true, that he came from a country where there is not 
a mountain to be seen? — Yes, I replied : you may go hundreds 
of miles without coming to one.—That must be beautiful! he 
exclaimed : das muss schon seyn! His exclamation was 
prompted no doubt by the thought of the difficulties which 
the mountains about him opposed to traffic and agriculture ; 
though even on his own score he erred, as Mammon is ever 
wont to do grossly. For those mountains gave him the lake, 
and attracted the strangers, whereby he earned his livelihood. 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


35 


But it is a perverse habit of the Imagination, when there is 
no call for action, to dwell on “ the ills we have,” without 
thinking of “ the others which we know not of.” This very 
man however, had he been transported to the plains he sighed 
for,—even though they had been as flat as Burnet’s Para¬ 
dise, or the tabula rasa which Locke supposed to be the 
paradisiacal state of the human mind,—would probably have 
been seized with the homesickness which is so common 
among his countrymen, as it is also among the Swedes and 
Norwegians, but which, I believe, is hardly found, except in 
the natives of a mountainous and beautiful country. 

The noisiest streams are the shallowest. It is an old 
saying, but never out of season; least of all in an age, the 
fit symbol of which would not be, like the Ephesian personi¬ 
fication of Nature, multimamma ,,—for it neither brings forth 
nor nourishes,—but multilingua. Your amateur will talk by 
the ell, or, if you wish it, by the mile, about the inexpressible 
charms of Nature : but I never heard that his love had 
caused him the slightest uneasiness. 

It is only by the perception of some contrast, that we 
become conscious of our feelings. The feelings however may 
exist for centuries, without the consciousness; and still, when 
they are mighty, they will overpower Consciousness ; when 
they are deep, it will be unable to fathom them. Love has 
indeed been called “ loquacious as a vernal bird; ” and with 
truth : but his loquacity comes on him mostly in the absence 
of his beloved. Here too the same illustration holds : the 
deep stream is not heard, until some obstacle opposes it. 
But can anybody, when floating down the Khine, believe that 
the builders and dwellers in those castles, with which every 
rock is crested, were blind to all the beauties around them ? 
Is it quite impossible that they should have felt almost as 
much as the sentimental tourist, who returns to his parlour 
in some metropolis, and puffs out the fumes of his admiration 
through his quill ? Has the moon no existence independent 
of the halo about her ? Or does the halo even flow from 
her 1 Is it not produced by the dimness and density of the 
.atmosphere through which she has to shine 1 Give me the 













36 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 




love of the bird that broods over her own nest, rather than of 
one that lays her eggs in the nest of another, albeit she warble 
about parental affection as loudly as Rousseau or Lord Byron. 

Convents too . . how many of them are situate amid the 
sublimest and most beautiful scenery ! I will only mention 
two, the great Chartreuse, and the monastery of the Camal- 
dulans near Naples. The hacknied remark at such places is, 

0 yes ! the monks always knew how to pick out the eyes of the 
land , and to pounce upon its fatness. It is forgotten that, 
when the convents were built, the country round was mostly 
either a barren wilderness, or a vast, impenetrable forest, and 
that, if things are otherwise now, the change is owing to the 
patient industry of the monks and their dependents, not 
liable to alternations and interruptions, as is the case with 
other proprietors, but continued without intermission through 
centuries. Though one is bound however to protest against 
this stale and vulgar scoff, I know not how we can imagine 
that the men, who, when half “ the world lay before them, 
where to choose their place of rest,” pitcht their homes in 
spots surrounded by such surpassing grandeur and beauty, 
can have been without all sense for what they saw. Rather, in 
retiring from the world to worship God in solitude, did they 
seek out the most glorious and awful chambers in that earthly 
temple, which also is “ not made with hands.” 

Add to this, that in every country, where there are national 
legends, they are always deeply and vividly imprest with a feel¬ 
ing of the magnificence or the loveliness in the midst of which 
they have arisen. Indeed they are often little else than the j 
expression and outpouring of those feelings : and such primi¬ 
tive poetical legends will hardly be found, except in the bosom 
of a beautiful country, growing up in it, and pendent from 
it, almost like fruit from a tree. The powerful influence 
exercised by natural objects in giving shape and life to those 
forms in which the Imagination embodies the ideas of super¬ 
human power, is finely illustrated by Wordsworth in one of 
the noblest passages of the Excursion : where he casts a glance 
over the workings of this principle in the mythologies of the 
Persians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, and the Greeks ; 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


37 


shewing with what plastic power the imaginative love of j 
Nature wedded and harmonized the dim conceptions of the 1 
mysteries which lie behind the curtain of the senses, with the 
objects by which it happened to be surrounded, incarnating 
the invisible in the visible, and impregnating the visible with 
the invisible. The same principle is of universal application. 
You may perceive how it has operated in the traditions of the 
Highlands, of the Rhine, of Bohemia, of Sweden and Norway, 
in short of every country where poetry has been indigenous. 

As the poetry of the Asiatic nations may be termed the 
poetry of the sun, so the Edda is the poetry of ice. u. 


I have been trying to shew, that, though a taste for the 
picturesque, as the very form of the word picturesque, which 
betrays its recent origin, implies, is a late growth, a kind of 
aftermath, in the mind of a people, which cannot arise until a 
nation has gone through a long process of intellectual culture, 
nor indeed until after the first crop has been gathered in, still a 
feeling and love for the beauties of Nature may exist altogether 
independently of that self-conscious, self-analysing taste, and 
that such a feeling is sure to spring up, wherever there is j 
nourishment for it, in a nation’s vernal prime : although 
there may be a period, between the first crop and the after- 
math, when the field looks parcht and yellow and bristly, 
and as if the dew of heaven could not moisten it. When 
the mind of a people first awakes, it is full of its morning 
dreams, and holds those dreams to be, as the proverb accounts 
them, true. A long time passes,—it must encounter and 
struggle with opposition,—before it acquires anything like a 
clear, definite self-consciousness. For a long time it scarcely 
regards itself as separate from Nature. It lies in her arms, 
and feeds at her breast, and looks up into her face, and smiles 
at her smiles. When it speaks, you rather hear the voice of 
Nature speaking through it, than any distinct voice of its 
own. It is like a child, in all whose words and thoughts you 
may perceive the promptings of its mother. Very probably 
indeed it may not talk much about its love for its mother : 
but it will give the strongest proofs of that love, by thinking 









33 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

in all things as its mother thinks, and speaking as its mother 
speaks, and doing as its mother does. 

This is the character of poetry in early times. It may be 
objected that you find no picturesque descriptions in it. That 
is to say, the poets have not learnt to look at Nature with 
the eye of a painter, nor to seek for secondary, reflex beauties 
in natural objects, arising whether from symbolical, or from 
accidental associations. Nor do you see their love of Nature 
from their talking about nature : for they are not conversant 
with abstractions; they deal only with persons and things. 
You may discern that love however by the way in which it 
is mixt up with the whole substance of their minds, as the 
glow of health mixes itself up with the whole substance of 
our bodies, unthought of, it may be, until we are reminded 
of it by its opposite, but still felt and enjoyed. 

Of Asiatic poetry it is needless to speak : for that even 
now has hardly emerged from its nonage, or risen beyond a 
child’s fondness for flowers. But even in Homer,—although 
in Greek poetry afterward the human element, that which 
treats of man as being and doing and suffering, predominated 
more than in the poetry of any other country over the 
natural, which dwells on the contemplation of the outward 
world, its forms, its changes, and its influences,—and though 
i the germs of this are to be found in the living energy and 
definiteness and bodiliness of all Homer’s characters,—still 
what a love of Nature is there in him ! What a fresh 
morning air breathes through those twin firstbirths of Poetry! 
what a clear bright sky hangs above those two lofty peaks of 
| Parnassus ! In his own words we may say, that over them 
VTVeppayrj aaneros aldrjp. Indeed this aaneros aWfjp may be 
regarded as the peculiar atmosphere of Greek literature and 
art, an atmosphere which then first opened and broke upon 
it. Of all poems the Homeric have the most thoroughly 
out-of-door character. We stand on the Ionian coast, looking 
out upon the sea, and beholding it under every variety 
of hue and form and aspect. And there he too was 
wont to stand ; there, as Coleridge so melodiously expresses 
it, he 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 39 

. 

Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee 

Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea. 

Every epithet he gives to a natural object, every image taken 
from one, has the liveliest truth : and truth is ever the best 
proof that any one can give of love. Of the poetical 
descriptions of morning composed since the days of Homer, 
the chief part are little else than expansions and amplifica¬ 
tions of his three sweet epithets, ypiyeveia, KpoKotren^os, and 
podo8dKTv\os. Nor can anything be more aptly chosen than 
his adjuncts and accompaniments : which shews that he 
was not destitute of what we call the sentimental love of 
Nature, that love of Nature which discerns a correspondence, 
and as it were a sympathy, between its appearances and 
changes, and the vicissitudes of human feeling and passion. 
Chryses, after his entreaties have been denied, walks ddaiv 
mipa 6lva 7ro\v(f)\ol(r(3oio dakaacrrjs, where the murmur of its 
waves responds to his feelings, and stirs him to pour them 
forth in a prayer to Apollo. In like manner Achilles, when 
Briseis is taken from him, sits apart by himself, 6fiv t<fi’ aXos 
7 To\ir)? 6poa>v snl oivona itovtov. The epithet o’Lvoira , denoting 
the dark gloom, perhaps the purple grape-colour of the 
distant sea, while it was dashing and foaming at his feet, 
brings it into harmony and sympathy with Achilles. A 
bright, blue sea would have been out of keeping. Or take a 
couple of similies. When Apollo comes down from Olympus 
to avenge his insulted priest, he comes wkti ioiicm. When 
Thetis rises from the sea to listen to her son’s complaint, she 
rises tjvt opixXrj. Parallels to these two similies may be found 
in two of our own greatest poets. Milton says that Pan¬ 
demonium “ Bose like an exhalation from the earth.” 
Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner tells us that he passes “like 
Night from land to land.” Milton’s image is a fine one. 
Coleridge’s appears to me, to adopt an expression which he 
uses in speaking of Wordsworth’s faults, “ too great for the 
subject,” a piece of “mental bombast.” Be this however as it 
may, how inferior are they both, in grandeur, in simplicity, in 
beauty, in grace, to the Homeric ! which moreover have better 
caught the spirit and sentiment of the natural appearances. 










40 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


For Apollo does come with the power and majesty, and 
with the terrours of Night; and the soft waviness of an 
exhalation is a much fitter image for the rising of the 
goddess, than for the massiness and hard, stiff outline of a 
building. In Homer’s landscapes, it is true, there is a want, 
or rather an absence, of those ornamental, picturesque 
epithets, with which Pope has bedizened his translation. 
This however only shews that the objects he speaks of “ had 
no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any 
interest Unborrowed from the eye.” Such as they are, he 
loves them for their own sake. In his vivid, transparent 
verse, egetyavev naacu (TKomai Kai tt proves aKpot, Kai vanai, — Havra 
8e r eiSercu aarpa. We feel too that he, as he says of his 
shepherd, yeyrjdc (ppeva at the sight; though no “ conscious 
swain,” as Pope styles him, nor thinking of “ blessing the 
useful light,” as by a kind of second sight of utilitarianism 
the bard of Twickenham is pleased to make him. 

This distinctness of the Homeric descriptions leads Cicero, 
in a fine passage of the Tusculan Questions, to contend that 
he who, though blind, could so represent every object as to 
enable us to see what he himself could not see, must have 
derived great pleasure and enjoyment from his inward sight. 
There is more reason however in the witticism of Velleius, 
that, if any one supposes Homer to have been born blind, he 
must himself be destitute of every sense. For never was a 
fable more repugnant to truth, than that of Homer’s blind¬ 
ness. It originated probably in the identification of the 
author of the Iliad with the author of the Hymn to Apollo, 
and was then fostered by the notion that Homer designed to 
represent himself under the character of Demodocus in the 
Odyssee. Milton has indeed made a fine use of Homer’s 
blindness : but, looking at it as a fact, one might as reason¬ 
ably believe that the sun is blind, as that Homer was. 

In the Greek poets of the great age, I have already 
admitted, there is little love of Nature. Man was then 
become very nearly all-in-all, to whose level the gods them¬ 
selves were brought down,—not the skeleton man of philo¬ 
sophy, nor the puppet of empirical observation,—but the 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 41 

ideal man of imaginative thought, an idea as perfect as it 
can be, when drawn from no higher source than what lies in 
man himself. The manifold dazzling glories of Athens and 
of Greece filled their minds with the notion of the greatness 
of human nature : and that greatness they tried to exhibit 
in its struggles with fate and with the gods. Their cha¬ 
racters are mostly statuesque even in this respect, that they 
have no background. In the Prometheus itself, the wilder¬ 
ness and the other natural horrours are mainly employed, 
like the chains and wedge, as instruments by which Jupiter 
tries to intimidate the benefactor of mankind. This however 
is not so much the case with Sophocles; in whose Edipus at 
Colonus, Ajax, and Philoctetes, the scenery forms an important 
element, not merely in the imaginative, but even in the 
dramatic beauty. In after times, when the glory of Greece 
had faded and sunk, when its political grandeur had decayed, 
and man was no longer the one engrossing object of admira¬ 
tion, we find a revival of the love of Nature in the pastoral 
poetry of the Sicilians. 

With regard to modem poetry, when we are looking at 
any question connected with its history, we ought to bear in 
mind that we did not begin from the beginning, and that, 
with very few exceptions, we had not to hew our materials 
out of the quarry, or to devise the groundplan of our edifices, 
but made use, at least in great measure, of the ruins and 
substructions of antiquity. Hence Greece alone affords a 
type of the natural development of the human mind through 
its various ages and stages. Owing to this, and perhaps 
still more to the influence, direct and indirect, of Christianity, 
we from the first find a far greater body of reflective thought 
in modern poetry than in ancient. Dante is not, what 
Homer was, the father of poetry springing in the freshness 
and simplicity of childhood out of the arms of mother earth: 
he is rather, like Noah, the father of a second poetical world, 
to whom he pours out his prophetic song, fraught with the 
wisdom and the experience of the old world. Indeed he 
himself expresses this by representing himself as wandering 
on his awful pilgrimage under the guidance of Virgil. 



42 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

It would require a long dissertation, illsuited to these 
pages, to pursue this train of thought through the literature 
of modern Europe. Let me hasten home, and take a glance 
at our own poets. The early ones, especially the greatest 
among them, were intense and devoted lovers of Nature. 
Chaucer sparkles with the dew of morning. Spenser lies 
bathed in the sylvan shade. Milton glows with orient light. 
One might almost fancy that he had gazed himself blind, 
and had then been raised to the sky, and there stood and 
waited, like “ blind Orion hungering for the morn.” So 
abundantly had he stored his mind with visions of natural 
beauty, that, when all without became dark, he was still 
most rich in his inward treasure, and “ Ceast not to wander 
where the Muses haunt Clear spring, or shady grove, or 
sunny hill.” Shakspeare “glances from heaven to earth, 
from earth to heaven.” All nature ministers to him, as 
gladly as a mother to her child. Whether he wishes her to 
tune her myriad-voiced organ to Romeo’s love, or to 
Miranda’s innocence, or to Perdita’s simplicity, or to Rosa¬ 
lind’s playfulness, or to the sports of the Fairies, or to 
Timon’s misanthropy, or to Macbeth’s desolating ambition, 
or to Lear’s heart-broken frenzy,—he has only to ask, and 
she puts on every feeling and every passion with which he 
desires to invest her. 

But, when Milton lost his eyes, Poetry lost hers. A time 
followed, when our poets ceast to commune with Nature, and 
ceast to love her, and, as there can be no true knowledge 
without love, ceast therefore to know anything about her. 
Man again became all-in-all,—but not the ideal human 
nature of Greek poetry, in its altitudes of action and passion. 
The human nature of our poets in those days was the human 
nature of what was called the town , with all its pettinesses 
and hollownesses and crookednesses and rottennesses. The 
great business and struggle of men seemed to be, to outlie, 
outcheat, outwhore, and outhector each other. Our poets 
then dwelt in Grub-street, and, to judge from their works, 
seldom left their garrets, save for the coffeehouse, the play¬ 
house, or the stews. Dryden wrote a bombastical description 



GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


43 


of night, from which one might suppose that he had never 
seen night, except by candlelight. He talkt of “ Nature’s 
self seeming to lie dead,”—of “ the mountains seeming to 
nod their drowsy head,”—much as Charles the Second used 
to do at a sermon,—and of “ sleeping flowers sweating 
beneath the nightdews,”—which I can only parallel by a 
translation I once saw of Virgil’s Scilicet is superis labor est , 
“ Ay sure, for this the gods laborious sweat” Yet this was 
extolled by Rymer, a countryman of Shakspeare’s, as the 
finest description of night ever composed : an opinion which 
Johnson quotes, without expressing any dissent ; telling us 
moreover that these lines were repeated oftener in his days 
than almost any others of Dryden’s. 

It is true that, as I have been reminded, Shakspeare also 
has said of night, “ Now o’er the one half world Nature 
seems dead ; ” and doubtless it was from hence that Dryden 
took what he thought a very grand idea. But as thieves 
never know or dare to make the right use of their stolen 
goods, so is it mostly with plagiaries. The verbal likeness 
only exposes the empty turgidity of Dryden : nor can there 
be a more striking illustration of Quintilian’s saying, Multa 
fiunt eadem , sed aliter. For observe, where Shakspeare uses 
this expression, and how it exemplifies that unrivaled power 
of imagination, wherewith, under the impulses of a mighty 
passion, he fuses every object by its intense radiation, and 
brings them into harmony with that passion by bathing 
them in a flood of bright, or sombre, or mellow, or bloodred 
light. Macbeth, just as he is going to commit the murder, 
standing on the very brink of hell, and about to plunge into 
it, sees the reflexion of his own chaotic feelings in all things. 
Order is turned into disorder; law is suspended; every 
natural, every social tie is cracking : he is hurling an inno¬ 
cent man, his guest, his king, into the jaws of death : death 
is in all his thoughts. To him therefore, with the deepest 
truth, “ o’er the one half world Nature seems dead; ” even 
as he had just seen the instrument with which the crime 
was to be perpetrated, “in palpable form” before him, 
though only “ a dagger of the mind, a false creation, Pro- 



44 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

ceeding from the heat-oppressed brain.” All the other 
visions too which haunt him are of the same kind. 

Wicked dreams abuse 
The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates 
Pale Hecate’s offerings ; and withered Murder, 

Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf, 

Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, 

With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, toward his design 
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth, 

Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear 
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout. 

And take the present liorrour from the time, 

Which now suits with it. 

With what wonderful fitness do all the images, all the 
thoughts, all the words here “suit” with each other, and 
with Macbeth’s terrific purpose! whereas in Dry den’s 
description there is no congruity, but only a string of poor 
and incongruous conceits, cold and extravagant ; and the 
occasion is merely that Cortez, who with like incongruity has 
fallen in love at sight with the daughter of Montezuma, 
cannot sleep, because “ Love denies Rest to his soul, and 
slumber to his eyes.” What then must have been the know¬ 
ledge of Nature, and what the feeling for it, in an age when 
the poetical imagery, which the readers and repeaters of 
poetry were accustomed to associate with night, was Nature’s 
lying dead, mountains nodding their drowsy heads, little birds 
repeating their songs in sleep, and sleeping flowers sweating 
beneath the nightdews ? People even learnt to fancy, and to 
tell one another, that all this was indeed so. As it is the 
wont of hollow things to echo, whenever a poet hit on a 
striking image, or a startling expression, it was bandied from 
mouth to mouth. Thus nodding mountains became a stock 
phrase. Pope makes Eloisa talk of “ lowbrowed rocks that 
hang nodding o’er the deep : ” where however we may suppose 
the poet to transfer the motion of the image in the water to 
the rocks themselves. In his Iliad, “ Pelion nods his shaggy 
brows,” and “ nodding Ilion waits the impending fall : ” in his 
Odyssee, “ On Ossa Pelion nods with all his woods.” The 
same piece of falsetto is doubtless to be found scores of times 
in the versewriters of the same school. 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


45 


Yet description, and moral satire or declamation, were the 
richest veins, poor and shallow as they are at best, which 
were opened in our serious verse between the death of Milton 
and the regeneration of English poetry at the close of the last 
century. Nor was our description of the highest kind, being 
deficient both in imaginativeness and in reality. It seldom 
betokened anything like that intimate, personal, thoughtful, 
dutiful, and loving communion with Nature, which we per¬ 
ceive in every page of Wordsworth : and owing to this very 
want of familiarity with the realities, our poets could not deal 
with them as he does, shaping and moulding and combining 
and animating them, according to the impulses of his imagi¬ 
nation, and calling forth new melodies and harmonies, to fill 
earth, sea, and sky. They did look at Nature through the 
spectacles of books. It was as though a number of eyes had 
been set in a row, like boys playing at leap-frog, each hinder 
one having to look through all that stood before it, and hence 
seeing Nature, not as it is in itself, but refracted and dis¬ 
torted by a number of more or less turbid media. Ever and 
anon too some one would be seized with the ambition of 
surpassing his predecessors, and would try by a feat at leap 
eye to get before them : in so doing however, from ignorance 
of the ground, he mostly stumbled and fell. Making an im¬ 
potent effort after originality, he would attempt to vary the 
combinations of words in which former writers had spoken of 
the same objects : but, as one is ever liable to trip, and to 
violate idiom at least, if not grammar, when speaking a forein 
| language, so by these aliens to Nature, and sojourners in the 
land of Poetry, images and expressions, which belonged to 
particular circumstances, or to particular phases of feeling, 
were often misapplied to circumstances and feelings with which 
they were wholly incongruous. When the jay spread out his 
peacock’s tail, many of the quills were sticking up in the air. 

But though our descriptive poetry was mostly wanting 
both in imaginativeness and in reality, this did not disqualify 
it for being what is called picturesque. For picturesqueness, 
as it is commonly understood, consists not in looking at 
things as they really are, and as the sun or Homer look at 










4 1 ) GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

them, nor in seeing them, as Shakspeare, Milton, Words¬ 
worth see them, transfigured by the plastic power of the 
Imagination, but rather in seeing them, arrayed in the associa¬ 
tions of various kinds with which the course of ages has 
surrounded them. Painting, even historical painting, being 
mute, and poorly supplied with means for expressing new or 
remote combinations of thought, has ever succeeded best in 
representing that which is familiar and easy to be understood. 
It has so scanty a vocabulary to tell its story with, that its 
story must needs be a short one, and ought to be such that 
its outline and main features should be discernible at a 
glance. For it has to speak to the eye, "which does not 
proceed cumulatively and step by step, and the impressions of 
which are rather coinstantaneous than successive. Its busi¬ 
ness is to give the utmost accuracy, completeness, and delicacy, 
to the details it makes use of in expressing such ideas as have 
already got possession of the popular mind, and form a 
portion of the popular belief. If it can do this, it can well 
refrain from seeking to utter new ideas, or going on a voyage 
! of discovery into unknown regions of thought. Its stock in 
trade may be said to consist chiefly in common-places : and 
it no more tires of or by repeating them, than a rosebush 
tires of or by pouring forth roses, or than the sun tires of or 
by shining daily upon the same landscape. In poetry on 
the other hand commonplaces are worthless. Only so far as 
a work is original, only so far as a thought is original, 
either in its form and conception, or at least in its position 
and combination, can it be said to be truly poetical. 
Poetry and Painting are indeed sister arts, as they have 
often been termed. But the sphere of each is totally dis¬ 
tinct from that of the other: though they can be made to 
touch at any point, they cannot be made to coincide ; nor 
can they be brought to touch in more points than one at the 
same moment, without some bruise and injury to one or the 
other. Painting by the outward is to express the inward; 
Poetry by the inward is to express the outward : but the 
main and immediate business of Painting is with the outward, 
that of Poetry with the inward. That which Painting repre- 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


47 



ing can only symbolize. Whenever this is forgotten, it is 
hurtful to both. Fuseli, for instance, was always forgetting 
the painter, in striving to be a poet. Perhaps the same was 
sometimes too much the case with Hogarth. Assuredly it is 
so with Martin, and frequently with Turner, who would have 
been a still greater painter, had he not been perpetually 
striving to be more than a painter can be. On the other 
hand, when Poetry becomes picturesque, it is like Prospero 
I casting away his wand, to take up a common sceptre : and it 
will mostly have to learn that ordinary men are more 
unmanageable, not only than Ariels, but even than Calibans. 

In truth this has been one of the misfortunes of our poetry 
for the last hundred and fifty years, that it has been much 
more picturesque than poetical. To many of the excellences 
of painting indeed it has made little pretension. It has no 
foreground ; it has no background : it wants light; it wants 
shade : it wants an atmosphere: it wants the unity resulting 
from having all the parts placed at once before the eye. All 
these things are missing in descriptive poetry; though in epic 
and dramatic there are qualities that correspond to them. 
This is enough to shew how idle it is for Poetry to abandon 
its own domain, and try to set up its throne in the territory 
of its neighbour. Everything that our poets had to mention, 
was described and reflected upon. First one thing was 
described and reflected upon; and then something else was 
described and reflected upon; and then . . . some third 
thing was treated in the same way. The power of infusing 
life and exhibiting action is wanting. No word was supposed 
to be capable of standing alone; all must have a crutch to 
lean on : every object must be attended by an epithet or 
two, or by a phrase, pickt out much as schoolboys pick theirs 
out of the Gradus, with little regard to any point except its 
fitting the verse, and not disturbing its monotonous smooth¬ 
ness. If it had ever been applied to the object by any poet, 
if it ever could be applied to it under any circumstances, this 
was enough : no matter whether it suited the particular 
occasion or no. The grand repository for all such phraseology 
1 __ 













4S 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


was that translation of Homer, which has perhaps done more 
harm than any other work ever did to the literature of its 
country; thus exactly reversing the fate of its original. For 
assuredly no human work ever exercised so powerful and 
beneficial an influence on the literature and arts of the people 
out of whom it sprang, as the Homeric poems. Nor can I 
think that there was much ground in point of fact for Plato’s 
charge, of their having been injurious to religion and morality. 
The mischief had other sources, inherent in Polytheism, and 
such as Natural Religion cannot quench. But as for Pope’s 
translation, it has been a sort of poetic stage-wardrobe, to 
which anybody might resort for as much tinsel and tawdry 
lace, and as many Bristol diamonds, as he wanted, and where 
everybody might learn the welcome lesson, that the last thing 
to be thought of in writing verses is the meaning. 

Even since the dawn of a better day on our poetry, descrip¬ 
tion and reflexion have still absorbed too large a portion of 
its energy. Few writers have kept it before their eyes so 
distinctly as the authors of Count Julian and of Philip Van 
Artevelde , that the great business and office of poetry is not 
to describe, but to create, not to pour forth an everlasting 
singsong about mountains and fountains, and hills and rills, 
and flowers and bowers, and woods and floods, and roses and 
posies, and vallies and allies, but to represent human 
character and feeling, action and passion, the ceaseless war¬ 
fare, and the alternate victories of Life and of Death. u. 


The line of Milton quoted above, in which Pandemonium 
is described as rising out of the earth, “ like an exhalation,” 
is supposed by Mr. Peck to be “ a hint taken from some of 
the moving scenes and machines invented for the stage by 
Inigo Jones.” This conjecture is termed very probable by 
Bishop Newton, in a note repeated by Dr. Hawkins, and by 
Mr. Todd; and the latter tries to confirm it by an extract 
from an account of a Mask acted at Whitehall in 1637. Alas 
for poets, when the critics set about unraveling their 
thoughts ! when they even pretend to make out by what old 
bones their minds have been manured ! On seeing a poet 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 49 

overlaid by a copious variorum commentary, one is often 
reminded of Gulliver lying helpless and stirless under the net 
that the Lilliputians had spun around him. Thus Malone 
suggests that, when Shakspeare made Lady Macbeth, in the 
trance of her bloody ambition, pray that heaven might not 
“peep through the blanket of the dark,” he was probably 
thinking of “ the coarse woolen curtain of his own theatre, 
through which probably, while the house was yet but half 
lighted, he had himself often peept .” 

But to be serious : even if the Mask referred to had been 
acted in 1657, instead of 1637, and if Milton in that year 
had had eyes to see it with, I should still have been slow to 
believe that a thought so trivial could have crost his mind, 
when he was hovering on the outspread wings of his imagi¬ 
nation over the abyss of hell. An eagle does not stoop after 
a grub. Sheridan indeed, who never scrupled to borrow, 
whether money or thoughts, and to pass them olf for his own, 
might have caught such a hint from the stage. For, having 
no light in himself, he tried to patch up a mimic sun, by 
sticking together as many candles as he could lay hands on, 
—wax, mould, or rushlights, no matter which. Hence, 
brilliant as his comedies are, they want unity and life : they 
rather sparkle, than shine ; and are like a box of trinkets, 
not a beautiful head radiant with jewelry. Of Milton’s 
mind, on the other hand, the leading characteristic is its 
unity. He has the thoughts of all ages at his command; 
but he has made them his own. He sits “ high on a throne 
of royal state, adorned With all the wealth of Ormus and of 
Ind, And where the gorgeous East with richest hand Has 
showered barbaric pearl and gold.” There are no false gems 
in him, no tinsel. It seems as if nothing could dwell in his 
mind, but what was grand and sterling. 

Besides, if we look at the passage, the “ fabric huge ” does 
not rise at once, as the commentators appear to have supposed, 
ready-made by a charm out of the earth, like a scene from 
the floor of a theatre ; which is thus strangely brought in to 
serve for a go-between in this simily; as though Milton, 
without such a hint, could not have thought of comparing 



50 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

the erection of Pandemonium to the rising of a mist. Such 
was the dignified severity of Milton’s mind, that he has care¬ 
fully abstained throughout Paradise Lost from everything 
like common magic. His spirits are superhuman; and their 
actions are supernatural, but not unnatural or contranatural. 
That is, the processes by which they accomplish their pur¬ 
poses are analogous to those by which men do so : they are 
subject to the same universal laws; only their strength and 
speed are immeasurably greater. But he has nothing arbi¬ 
trary, no capricious, fantastical transformations. When any¬ 
thing appears to be such, there is always a moral purpose to 
justify it; as in the sublime passage where the applause 
which Satan expects, is turned into “ a dismal universal hiss,” 
exemplifying how the most triumphant success in evil is in 
fact a sinking deeper and deeper in misery and shame. To 
a higher moral law the laws of Nature may bend, but not to 
a mere act of wilfulness. That Pandemonium was built 
aboveground, and not drawn up from underground, is clear 
from the previous account of the materials prepared for it. 
Milton wanted a council-chamber for his infernal conclave. 
Of course it was to surpass everything on earth in magnifi¬ 
cence ; and it was to be completed almost instantaneously. 
Hence, instead of exhibiting the gradual process of a laborious 
accumulation, it seemed to spring up suddenly, to rise “ like 
an exhalation.” 

This comparison may possibly have been suggested by the 
Homeric tjvt o^L^Xrj. At least a recollection of Homer’s 
image may have been floating in Milton’s mind ; as it is 
clear that just after, when he says, the fabric rose “ with the 
sound Of dulcet symphonies, and voices sweet,” he must have 
been thinking of the legend of Amphion building the walls 
of Thebes. For his mind was such a treasury of learning, 
—he had so fed on the thoughts of former ages, transub¬ 
stantiating them, to use his own expression, by “ concoctive 
heat,”—and the knowledge of his earlier years seems to 
have become so much more vivid and ebullient, when fresh 
influxes were stopt,—that one may allowably attribute all 
manner of learned allusions to him, provided they are in 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 51 

harmony with his subject, and lie within the range of his 
reading. Many of these have been detected by his com¬ 
mentators : but the investigation is by no means exhausted. 
Not a few of his allusions they have mist : others they have 
mistaken. 

For instance, in the note on the passage where Milton 
compares one of the regions of hell to “ that great Serbonian 
bog Betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old, Where armies 
whole have sunk,” the modern editors, in a note taken from 
Patrick Hume, refer only to Herodotus and Lucan; neither 
of whom says a word about armies being lost in the bog. 
I conclude therefore that no commentator has traced this 
passage to its real source in Diodorus Siculus (i. 30); where 
we are told, that “ persons ignorant of the country, who 
approach the lake Serbonis, have to encounter unlookt-for 
perils. For the firth being narrow and like a fillet, and vast 
sandbanks lying round it on all sides, when the south wind 
blows for a continuance, a quantity of sand is driven over it. 
This covers the water, and renders the surface of the lake so 
like that of the land, as to be quite undistinguishable. 
Hence many who did not know the nature of the spot, 
missing the road, have been swallowed up, along with whole 
armies” In a subsequent part of his History (xvi. 46), he 
says that Artaxerxes, in his expedition into Egypt, lost a 
part of his army there. The substance of the preceding 
passage is indeed given by George Sandys in his Travels, 
and thence extracted by Purchas, p. 913; but Milton’s 
source was probably the Greek. For his historical allusions 
are often taken from Diodorus, with whom he seems to have 
been better acquainted than with the earlier historians,—the 
immense superiority of the latter not being generally recog¬ 
nised in those days ;—and who, as Wakefield has shewn, was 
his authority for the beautiful passage about the mariners 
off at sea, senting “ Sabean odours from the spicy shore Of 
Araby the blest.” 

Other blind men, it is true, seldom quote books : but it is 
not so with Milton. The prodigious power, readiness, and 
accuracy of his memory, as well as the confidence he felt in 

n 2 



52 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


it, are proved by his setting himself, several years after he 
had become totally blind, to compose his Treatise on 
Christian Doctrine ; which, made up as it is of Scriptural 
texts, would seem to require perpetual reference to the 
Sacred Volume. A still more extraordinary enterprise was 
that of the Latin Dictionary,—a work which, one would 
imagine, might easily wear out a sound pair of eyes, but in 
which hardly any man could stir a couple of steps without 
eyes. Well might he, who, after five years of blindness, had 
the courage to undertake these two vast works, along with 
Paradise Lost, declare that he did “not bate a jot Of heart 
or hope, but still bore up and steered Uphillward .” For 
this is the word which Milton at first used in his noble 
sonnet; though for the sake of correctness, steering uphill- 
ward being a kind of pilotage which he alone practist, or 
which at all events is only practicable where the clogs of 
this material world are not dragging us down, he altered it 
into right onward. 

To return to the passage which led to this discussion: 
not only is Mr. Peck’s conjecture at variance with Milton’s 
conception of the manner in which Pandemonium is con¬ 
structed, and with the processes by which thoughts arise in 
the mind of a true poet, as incongruous as it would be for 
the sun to shoot his rays through a popgun : there is also a 
third objection, to which some may perhaps attach more 
weight; namely, the long interval which must have elapst 
since Milton saw the machinery referred to, if indeed he had 
ever seen it at all. Sheridan, as I have said, had he been at 
the play overnight, and been writing verses about Pande¬ 
monium the next morning, might have bethought himself 
that it would be a happy hit to make Pandemonium rise up 
like a palace in a pantomime. But even Sheridan would 
hardly have done this, unless the impression had been so 
recent and vivid, as to force itself upon the mind in despite 
of the more orderly laws of association. Now Milton can 
have seen nothing of the sort since the closing of the theatres 
in 1642. Nor is it likely that he was ever present at a 
Court-mask. But Inigo Joneses improvements in machinery 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 53 

were probably confined to the Court. For new inventions 
did not travel so fast in those days as now : and the change 
of scene in Comns from the wood to the palace seems to 
have been effected in a different manner. At all events one 
should have to suppose that this spectacle, which Milton, if 
he ever saw it, would have forgotten forthwith, lay dormant 
in his mind for above fifteen years, until on a sudden, it 
started up unbidden, when he was describing the building of 
Pandemonium. 

That an antiquarian critic, like Mr. Peck, should have 
brought forward such a conjecture, may not be very 
wonderful. For it requires no little self-denial to resist the 
temptation of believing that we have hit on an ingenious 
thought: the more strange and out of the way the thought, 
the likelier is it to delude us. But that he should have 
found companions in his visionary ramble,—that a person 
like Bishop Newton, who was not without poetical taste, 
and who had not the same temptation to mislead him, 
should deem his conjecture very probable,—that critic after 
critic should approve of it,—is indeed surprising. With regard 
to Mr. Todd however, we see from other places that he too 
has an itching for explaining poetry by the help of personal 
anecdotes. Thus he suggests that the two lines in the 
description of the castle in the Allegro ,—“ Where perhaps 
some beauty lies, The Cynosure of neighbouring eyes,”— 
were designed as a compliment to the Countess of Derby, 
who had a house near Milton’s father’s at Horton. Yet in 
the same breath he tells us that she was already a grand¬ 
mother ; and so, whatever she might have been in earlier 
days, she could hardly be any longer the Cynosure of 
neighbouring eyes , or even fancy that she was so. Therefore, 
unless Milton had expressly told her that she was his 
Cynosure, the compliment must have been wholly lost. 
And what need is there for supposing a particular reference 
to any one? The imaginative process by which Milton 
animates his castle, is so simple and natural, that I believe 
there are few young men, who have ever read a tale of 
romance, in whose minds, when they have been passing by 




5 4 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


castles, especially if “ bosomed high in tufted trees,” the 
fancy has not sprung up, how lovely a sight it would be, 
were a beautiful damsel looking out from the turret-window. 
The very first novel I have happened to take up since writing 
the above, Arnim’s Dolores, opens with a description of an 
old castle, with its little bright gardens in the turrets, 
where, he says, “perchance beautiful princesses may be 
watching the passing knight among wreaths of flowers of 
their own training.” This is nothing but the ordinary 
working of the Imagination, “Which, if it would but 
apprehend some joy, Straight comprehends some bringer of 
that joy.” 

These remarks would hardly have been worth making, 
unless anecdotical- explanations of poetry were so much in 
vogue. People of sluggish imaginations, whose thoughts 
seldom wander beyond the sphere of their eyes and ears, are 
glad to detect any mark in a great poet, which brings him 
down to their level, and proves that he could think of such 
matters as they themselves talk about with their neighbours. 
Moreover, as there is an irrepressible instinct of the under¬ 
standing, which leads us to seek out the causes of things 
they who have no eyes to discern the cause in the thing 
itself, look for it in something round about. They fancy 
that every thought must needs have an immediate outward 
suggestment: and if they catch sight of a dry stick lying 
near a tree, they cry out, evprjKa ! Here is one of the roots. 

The vanity of these anecdotical explanations is well 
reproved by Buttmann in his masterly Essay on the supposed 
personal allusions in Horace. But unfortunately even his 
own countrymen have not all taken warning from his admoni¬ 
tions. An overfondness for these exercises of ingenuity is 
the chief fault in Dissen’s otherwise valuable edition of 
Pindar : where, among a number of similar fantasies, we are 
told that the famous words, by which critics have been so 
much puzzled, apia-rov piv vdup ,— which, as the context 
plainly shews, declare the superiority of water to the other 
elements, like that of the Olympic to the other games,— 
were merely meant by the poet to remind Hiero’s guests 







GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


55 


that they ought to mix water with their wine : a conjecture 
which for impertinence is scarcely surpast by the notorious 
one, that Shakspeare served as a butcher’s boy, because he 
has a simily about a calf driven to the shambles, and makes 
Hamlet say, “ There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, 



might we establish that he practist every trade, and was a 
native of every country under heaven : nay, that he, instead 
of Pythagoras, must have been the real Euphorbus, and that 
the souls of half mankind must have transmigrated into 
his. 

What then ! Is it essential to poetry, that there should be 
nothing personal and individual in it 1 nothing indicative of 
the poet’s own feelings ? nothing drawn from his own 
experience 1 nothing to shew when, and where, and how, and 
with whom he has lived ? Is he to dwell aloof from the 
earth, as it were in a ring like Saturn’s, looking down on it 
in cold abstraction, without allowing any of its influences to 
come near him, and ruffle the blank mirror of his soul ? So 
far from it, that the poet, of all men, has the liveliest 
sympathy with the world around him, which to his eyes 
“ looks with such a look,” and to his ears “ speaks with such 
a tone, That he almost receives its heart into his own.” 
Nor has a critic any higher office, than that of tracing out 
the correspondence between the spirit of a great author, and 
that of his age and country. Illustrations of manners and 
customs too may be valuable, as filling up and giving reality 
to our conception of the world the poet saw around him. 
Only in such enquiries we must be on our guard against our 
constitutional tendency to mistake instruments for causes, 
and must keep in mind that the poet’s own genius is the 
corner-stone and the keystone of his works. 

While we confine ourselves to generalities, we may endea¬ 
vour, and often profitably, to explain the growth and struc¬ 
ture of a poet’s mind, so far as it has been modified by 
circumstances. But to descend to particulars, to deduce such 
and such a thought, or such and such an expression, from 
such and such an occasion, unless we have some historical 










56 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

ground to proceed on, is hazardous and idle; just as hazardous 
and idle as it would be to determine why a tree has put forth 
such and such a leaf, or to divine from what river or cloud 
the sea has drawn the watery particles which it casts up in 
such and such a wave. Generals, being few and lasting, we 
may apprehend : but particulars are so numerous, indefinite, 
and fleeting, one might as easily mark out and catch a mote 
dancing in the sunbeam. 

Not however that authentic information concerning the 
processes of a poet’s mind, and the origin of his works, when 
attainable, is to be rejected. In a psychological view it 
may often be instructive. Even Walter Scott’s confessions 
about the composition of his novels, external and superficial 
as they are, according to the character of his genius are not 
without interest. Benvenuto Cellini’s one can hardly read 
without partaking in his anxieties. Cowper’s poems derive 
a fresh charm from their connexion with the incidents of his 
life. Above all, in Goethe’s Memoirs, and of the other 
writings of his later years, we see the elements of his more 
genial works, and the nisus formativus which gave them unity 
and shape, exhibited with his own exquisite clearness, like 
the beautiful fibrous roots of a hyacinth in a glass of water. 
To take an image something like that which he himself has 
applied to Shakspeare, after pointing out the hours and the 
minutes which mankind has reacht in the great year of 
thought, he has opened the watch and enabled us to perceive 
the springs and the wheels. 

Here, to make my peace with anecdote-mongers, let me 
tell one relating to the origin of the finest statue of the 
greatest sculptor who has arisen since the genius of Greece 
droopt and wasted away beneath the yoke of Rome. An 
illustrious friend of mine, calling on Thorwaldsen some years 
ago, found him, as he said to me, in a glow, almost in a 
trance of creative energy. On his enquiring what had hap¬ 
pened, My friend , my dear friend ) said the sculptor, I have 
an idea , I have a work in my head , which will be worthy to 
live. A lad had been sitting to me some time as a model 
yesterday, when I bad him rest a while. In so doing he threw 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 57 

himself into an attitude which struck me very much. What a 
beautiful statue it would make ! I said to myself. But what 
would it do for ? It would do ... it would do ... it 
would do exactly for Mercury , drawing his sword , just after 
he has 'played Argus to sleep. I immediately began modeling. 
I workt all the evening , till at my usual hour I went to bed. 
But my idea would not let me rest. I was forced to get up 
again. I struck a light , and workt at my model for three or 
four hours ; after which I again went to bed. But again I 
could not rest: again I was forced to get up , and have been 
working ever since. 0 my friend , if I can but execute my idea, 
it will be a glorious statue. 

And a noble statue it is; although Thorwaldsen himself 
did not think that the execution came up to the idea. For 
I have heard of a remarkable speech of his made some years 
after to another friend, who found him one day in low spirits. 
Being askt whether anything had distrest him, he answered, 
My genius is decaying .— What do you mean ? said the visiter. 
— Why / here is my statue of Christ: it is the first of my works 
that I have ever felt satisfied with. Till now my idea has 
always been far beyond what I could execute. But it is no 
longer so. I shall never have a great idea again. The same, 
L believe, must have been the case with all men of true 
genius. While they who have nothing but talents, may 
often be astonisht at the effects they produce, by putting 
things together which fit more aptly than they expected ; a 
man of genius, who has had an idea of a whole in his mind, 
will feel that no outward mode of expressing that idea, 
whether by form, or colours, or words, is adequate to repre¬ 
sent it. Thus Luther, when he sent Staupitz his Commentary 
on the Epistle to the Galatians, said to him ( Epist. clxii), 
“ Nec jam adeo placent, quam placuerunt primum, ut videam 
potuisse latius et clarius eos exponi.” Thus too Solger, 
writing about his dialogues to Tieck, says (i. p. 432), “Now 
that I have read them through again, I find that they are 
far from attaining to that which stood before my mind when 
I wrote them : I feel as though they were a mere extract or 
shadow thereof. My only consolation is, that so it must 



58 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

doubtless be with every one who has aimed at anything 
excellent, that the execution of his plan does not satisfy 
him.” Hence it comes that men of genius have so often 
attacht the highest value to their less genial works. God 
alone could look down on His Creation, and behold that it 
was all very good. This contrast is remarkt by Bacon, and 
a grand use is made of it, at the close of the Introduction to 
the Novum Organum: “ Tu postquam conversus es ad spec- 
tandum opera quae fecerunt manus Tuae, vidisti quod omnia 
essent bona valde, et requievisti. At homo conversus ad 
opera quae fecerunt manus suae, vidit quod omnia essent 
vanitas et vexatio spiritus, nec ullo modo requievit. Quare, 
si in operibus Tuis sudabimus, facies nos visionis Tuae et 
sabbati Tui participes.” 

Thorwaldsen’s Mercury, it appears, was suggested by a lad 
whom he had seen sitting at rest. But does that detract 
from the sculptor’s genius? Every other man living might 
have seen the lad; and no statue of Mercury would have 
sprung out of the vision : even as millions upon millions 
before Newton had seen apples drop, without being led 
thereby to meditate on universal gravitation. So that, though 
Genius does not wholly create its works out of nothing, its 
“ mighty world ” is not merely what it perceives, but what, 
as Wordsworth expresses it in his lines on the Wye, “ it half 
creates.” u. 


Another* form of the same Materialism, which cannot com¬ 
prehend or conceive anything, except as the product of some 
external cause, is the spirit, so general in these times, which 
attaches an inordinate importance to mechanical inventions, 
and accounts them the great agents in the history of mankind. 
It is a common opinion with these exoteric philosophers, 
that the invention of printing was the chief cause of the 
Reformation, that the invention of the compass brought 
about the discovery of America, and that the vast changes in 
the military and political state of Europe since the middle 
ages have been wrought by the invention of gunpowder. 
It would be almost as rational to say that the cock’s crowing 





GUESSES AT TRUTH. 59 

makes the sun rise. Bacon indeed, I may be reminded, 
seems to favour this notion, where, at the end of the First 
Book of the Novum Organum , he speaks of the power and 
dignity and efficacy of inventions, “ quae non in aliis mani- 
festius occurrunt, quam in illis tribus quae antiquis incog- 
nitae—sunt, Artis nimirum Imprimendi, Pulveris Tormen- 
tarii, et Acus Nauticae. Haec enim tria rerum faciem et 
statum in orbe terrarum mutaverunt; primum, in re lit- 
teraria; secundum, in re bellica ; tertium, in navigationibus. 
Unde innumerae rerum mutationes secutae sunt; ut non 
imperium aliquod, non secta, non stella, majorem efficaciam 
et quasi influxum super res humanas exercuisse videatur, 
quam ista mechanica exercuerunt.” However, not to speak 
of the curious indication of a belief in astrology, it must be 
remembered that Bacon’s express purpose in this passage is 
to assert the dignity of inventions, that is, not of the natural, 
material objects in themselves, but of those objects trans¬ 
formed and fashioned anew by the mind of man, to serve the 
great interests of mankind. The difference between civilized 
and savage life, he had just said, “non solum, non coelum, non 
corpora, sed artes praestant.” In other words, the difference 
lies, not in any material objects themselves, but in the intel¬ 
ligence, the mind, that employs them for its own ends. 
These very inventions had existed, the greatest of them for 
many centuries, in China, without producing any like result. 
For why ? Because the utility of an invention depends on 
our making use of it. There is no power, non£ at least for 
good, in any instrument or weapon, except so far as there is 
power in him who wields it: nor does the sword guide and 
move the hand, but the hand the sword. Hay, it is the 
hand that fashions the sword. The means and instruments, 
as we see in China, may lie dormant and ineffective for cen¬ 
turies. But when man’s spirit is once awake, when his heart 
is alert, when his mind is astir, he will always discover the 
means he wants, or make them. Here also is the saying 
fulfilled, that they who seek will find. 

Or we may look at the matter in another light. We may 
conceive that, whenever any of the great changes ordained 



60 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

by God’s Providence in the destinies of mankind are about 
to take place, the means requisite for the effecting of those 
changes are likewise prepared by the same Providence. 
Niebuhr applied this to lesser things. He repeatedly expresses 
his conviction that the various vicissitudes by which learning 
has been promoted, are under the controll of an overruling 
Providence; and he has more than once spoken of the recent 
discoveries, by which so many remains of Antiquity have 
been brought to light, as Providential dispensations for the 
increase of our knowledge of God’s works, and of His crea¬ 
tures. His conviction was, that, though we are to learn in 
the sweat of our brow, and though nothing good can be 
learnt without labour, yet here also everything is so ordered, 
that the means of knowing whatever is needful and desirable 
may be discovered, if man will only be diligent in cultivating 
and making the most of what has already been bestowed on 
him. He held, that to him who has will be given,—that 
not only will he be enabled to make increase of the talents 
he has received, but that he is sure to find others in his path. 
This way of thinking has been reproved as profane, by those 
who yet would perhaps deem it impious if a man, when he 
cut his finger, or caught a cold, did not recognise a visitation 
of Providence in such accidents. Now why is this ? In all 
other things we maintain that man’s labour is of no avail, 
unless God vouchsafes to bless it,—that, without God’s 
blessing, in vain will the husbandman sow, in vain will the 
merchant s&nd his ships abroad, in vain will the physician 
prescribe his remedies. Why then do we outlaw knowledge ? 
Why do we declare that the exercise of our intellectual powers 
is altogether alien from God 1 Why do we exclude them, 
not only from the sanctuary, but even from the outer court 
of the temple ? Why do we deny that poets and philo¬ 
sophers, scholars and men of science, can serve God, each in 
his calling, as well as bakers and butchers, as well as hewers 
of wood and drawers of water ? 

It is true, there is often an upstart pride in the Under¬ 
standing ; and we are still prone to fancy that Knowledge of 
itself will make us as gods. Though so large a part of our 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 61 

knowledge is derivative, from the teaching either of other 
men or of things, and though so small a tittle of it can alone 
be justly claimed by each man as his own, we are apt to 
forget this, and to regard it as all our own, as sprung, like 
Minerva, full-grown out of our own heads; for this among 
other reasons, that, when we are pouring it forth, in what¬ 
soever manner, its original sources are out of sight; nor does 
anything remind us of the numberless tributaries by which 
it has been swelled. This tendency of Knowledge however 
to look upon itself as self-created and independent of God is 
much encouraged by the practice of the religious to treat it 
and speak of it as such. Were we wise, we should discern 
that the intellectual, the natural, and the moral world are 
three concentric spheres in God’s world, and that it is a 
robbery of God to cut off any one of them from Him, and 
give it up to the Prince of Darkness. As we read in the 
Boole of Wisdom , it is God, that hath given us certain know¬ 
ledge of the things that are, to know how the world was made, 
and the operation of the elements,—the beginning, ending, and 
midst of the times,—the alterations of the turning of the sun, 
and the change of seasons,—the circuits of years, and the 
positions of stars,—the natures of living creatures, and the 
furies of wild beasts,—the violence of winds, and the reasonings 
of men. 

Thus then does it behove us to deem of inventions, as 
instruments ordained for us, by the help of which we are to 
fulfill God’s manifold purposes with regard to tile destinies 
of mankind. At the fit time the fit instrument shews itself. 
If it comes before its time, it is still-born : man knows not 
what to do with it; and it wastes away. But when the 
mind and heart and spirit of men begin to teem with new 
thoughts and feelings and desires, they always find the out¬ 
ward world ready to supply them with the means requisite 
for realizing their aims. In this manner, when the idea of the 
unity of mankind had become more vivid and definite,—when 
all the speculations of History and Science and Philosophy 
were bringing it out in greater fulness,—when Poetry was 
becoming more and more conscious of its office to combine 



62 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

unity with diversity and multiplicity, and individuality 
with universality—and when Religion was applying more 
earnestly to her great work of gathering all mankind into 
the many mansions in the one great house of the Eternal 
Father,—at this time, when men’s hearts were yearning more 
than ever before for intercourse and communion, the means 
of communication and intercourse have been multiplied mar¬ 
vellously. This is good, excellent; and we may well be 
thankful for it. Only let us be diligent in using our new 
gifts for their highest, and not merely for meaner purposes ; 
and let us beware of man’s tendency to idolize the works of 
his own hands. The Greek poet exclaimed with wonder at the 
terrible ingenuity of man, who had yoked the horse and the 
bull, and had crost the roaring sea : and still, though the im¬ 
mediate occasions of his wonder would be somewhat changed, 
he would cry, tt oXAa ra beiva, Koibh avdpcoTrov dewrepov neXei. 
But, though a Heathen, he kept clear of the twofold danger 
of worshipping either man or his work. May we do so like¬ 
wise ! For there is not a whit to choose between the worship 
of steam, and that of the meanest Fetish in Africa. Nor is 
the worship of Man really nobler or wiser. u. 

I spoke some pages back of Greek literature as being cha¬ 
racterized by its aaneros aldrjp, its serene, transparent bright¬ 
ness. Ought I not rather to have said that this is the 
characteristic of the Christian mind, of that mind on which 
the true Light has indeed risen 1 Not, it appears to me, so 
far as that mind has been manifested in its works of poetry 
and art; at least with the exception of a starry spirit here 
and there, such as Fra Angelico da Fiesole and Raphael. 
For the Greeks lookt mainly, and almost entirely, at the out¬ 
ward, at that which could be brought in distinct and definite 
forms before the eye of the Imagination. To this they were 
predisposed from the first by their exquisite animal organiza¬ 
tion, which gave them a lively susceptibility for every enjoy¬ 
ment the outward world could offer, but which at the same 
time was so muscular and tightly braced as not to be over¬ 
powered and rendered effeminate thereby: and this their 





GUESSES AT TRUTH. 63 

natural tendency to receive delight from the active enjoy¬ 
ment of the outward world found everything in the outward 
world best fitted to foster and strengthen it. The climate 
and country were such as to gratify every appetite for plea¬ 
surable sensation, without enervating or relaxing the frame, 
or allowing the mind to sink into an Asiatic torpour. They 
rewarded industry richly: but they also called for it, and 
would not pamper sloth. By its physical structure Greece 
gave its inhabitants the hardihood of the mountaineer. Yet 
the Greeks were not like other mountaineers, whose minds 
seem mostly to have been bounded by their own narrow 
horizon, so as hardly to take count of what was going on in 
the world without: to which cause may in a great measure 
be ascribed the intellectual barrenness of mountainous coun¬ 
tries, or, if this be too strong an expression, the scantiness of 
the great works they have produced, when compared with 
the feelings which we might suppose they would inspire. 
But the Greek was not shut in by his mountains. Whenever 
he scaled a hight, the sea spread out before him, and wooed 
him to come into her arms, and to let her bear him away to 
some of the smiling islands she encircled. Hence, like the 
hero, who in his Homeric form is perhaps the best represen¬ 
tative of the Greek character, 7ro\\5>v avOpoiiuov ’Ibev aarea , Kcil 
voov eyvoo. He had the two great stimulants to enterprise 
before him. The voice of the Mountains, and the voice of 
the Sea, “ each a mighty voice,” were ever rousing and stir¬ 
ring and prompting him ; each moreover checking the hurtful 
effects of the other. The sea enlarged the range and scope 
of his thoughts, which the mountains might have hemmed 
in. Thus it saved him from the “homely wits,” which 
Shakspeare ascribes to “ home-keeping youth.” The moun¬ 
tains on the other hand counteracted that homelessness, 
which a mere sea-life is apt to breed, except in those in whom 
there is a living consciousness that on the sea as on the 
shore they are equally in the hand of God : to which home¬ 
lessness, and want of a solid ground to strike root in, it is 
mainly owing that neither Tyre nor Carthage, notwithstanding 
their power and wealth, occupies any place in the intellectual 



64 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


history of mankind. To the Greeks however, as to us, who 
have a country and a home upon the land, the sea was an 
inexhaustible mine of intellectual riches. Nor is it without 
a prophetic symbolicalness that the sea fills so important a 
part in both the Homeric poems. The amphibious character 
of the Greeks was already determined: they were to be lords 
of land and sea. Both these voices too, “ Liberty’s chosen 
music,” as Wordsworth terms them in his glorious sonnet, 
called the Greeks to freedom: and nobly did they answer to 
the call, when the sound of the mighty Pan was glowing in 
their ears, at Marathon and Thermopylae, at Salamis and 
Platea. 

Freedom moreover, and the free forms of their constitu¬ 
tions, brought numerous opportunities and demands for out¬ 
ward activity. The Greek poets and historians were also 
soldiers and statesmen. They had to deal with men, to act 
with them, and by them, and upon them, in the forum, and 
in the field. Their converse was with men in the concrete, 
as living agents, not with the abstraction, man, nor with the 
shadowy, self-reflecting visions of the imagination. Even at 
the present day, though our habits and education do so much 
to remove the distinctions among the various classes of 
society, there is a manifest difference between those authors 
who have taken an active part in public life, and those who 
are mere men of letters. The former, though they may often 
be deficient in speculative power, and unskilled in the forms 
of literature, have a knowledge of the practical springs of 
action, and a temperance of judgement, which is seldom 
found in a recluse, unaccustomed to meet with resistance 
among his own thoughts, or apt to slip away from it when 
he does, and therefore unpractist in bearing or dealing with 
it. That mystic seclusion, so common in modern times, as it 
has always been in Asia, was scarcely known in Greece. 
Even the want of books, and the consequent necessity of 
going to things themselves for the knowledge of them, 
sharpened the eyes of the Greeks, and gave them livelier and 
clearer perceptions : whereas our eyes are dimmed by poring 
over the records of what others have seen and thought • and 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

the impressions we thus obtain are much less vivid and 
true. 

Added to all this, their anthropomorphic Religion, which 
sprang in the first instance out of these very tendencies of 
the Greek mind, reacted powerfully upon them, as the free 
exercise of every faculty is wont to do, and exerted a great 
influence in keeping the Greeks within the sphere which 
Nature seemed to assign to them, by preventing their think¬ 
ing or desiring to venture out of that sphere, and by teaching 
them to find contentment and every enjoyment they could 
imagine within it. For it was by abiding within it that they 
were as gods. The feeling exprest in the speech of Achilles 
in Hades was one in which the whole people partook: 
ftovXoifxrjv K enapovpos ecov dqrevepev aXXto, 

77 ndcriv veKvecrcri KciTafyOip.evoio'iv avdaaei.v. 

Through the combined operation of these causes, the 
Greeks acquired a clearness of vision for all the workings of 
life, and all the manifestations of beauty, far beyond that of 
any other people. Whatever they saw, they saw thoroughly, 
almost palpably, with a sharpness incomprehensible in our 
land of books and mists. 

To mention a couple of instances : the anatomy of the 
older Greek statues is so perfect, that Mr. Haydon,—whose 
scattered dissertations on questions of art, rich as they often 
are in genius and thought, well deserve to be collected and 
preserved from a newspaper grave,—in his remarks on the 
Elgin marbles, pledged himself that, if any one were to break 
off a toe from one of those marbles, he would prove “ the 
great consequences of vitality, as it acts externally, to exist 
in that toe.” Yet it is very doubtful whether the Greeks 
ever anatomized human bodies,—at all events they knew 
hardly anything of anatomy scientifically, from an examina¬ 
tion of the internal structure,—before the Alexandrian age. 
Now, even with the help of our scientific knowledge, it is a 
rarity in modem art to find figures, of which the anatomy is 
not in some respect faulty; at least where the body is not 
either almost entirely concealed by drapery, or cased, like the 
yolk of an egg, in the soft albumen of a pseudo-ideal. When 


I. 









66 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


it is otherwise, as in the works of Michael Angelo and Anni- 
bal Caracci, we too often see studies, rather than works of 
art, and muscular contortions and convolutions, instead of 
the gentle play and flow of life. Mr. Haydon indeed 
contends that the Greek sculptors must have been good 
anatomists : but all historical evidence is against this suppo¬ 
sition. The truth is, that, as such wonderful stories are told 
of the keen eyes which the wild Indians have for all manner 
of tracks in their forests, so the Greeks had a clear and keen¬ 
sightedness in another direction, which to us, all whose per¬ 
ceptions are mixt up with such a bundle of multifarious 
notions, and who see so many things in everything, beside what 
we really do see, appears quite inconceivable. They studied 
life, not as we do, in’ death, but in life ; and that not in the 
stiff*, crampt, inanimate life of a model, but in the fresh, buoy¬ 
ant, energetic life, which was called forth in the gymnasia. 

Another striking example of the accuracy of the Greek 
eye is supplied by a remark of Spurzheim’s, that the heads 
of all the old Greek statues are in perfect accordance with 
his system, and betoken the very intellectual and moral 
qualities which the character was meant to be endowed with ; 
although in few modem statues or busts is any corre¬ 
spondence discoverable between the character and the shape 
of the head. For groundless and erroneous as may be the 
psychological, or, as the authors themselves term them, the 
phrenological views, which have lately been set forth as the 
scientific anatomy of the human mind, it can hardly be 
questioned that there is a great deal of truth in what 
Coleridge (Friend iii. p. 62) calls the indicative or gnomonic 
part of the scheme, or that Gall was an acute and accurate 
observer of those conformations of the skull, which are the 
ordinary accompaniments, if not the infallible signs, of the 
various intellectual powers. But in these very observations 
he had been anticipated above two thousand years ago by 
the unerring eyes of the Greek sculptors. 

In like manner do the Greeks seem, by a kind of intuition, 
to have at once caught the true principles of proportion and 
harmony and grace and beauty in all things,—in the human 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


67 


figure, in architecture, in all mechanical works, in style, in 
the various forms and modes of composition. These prin¬ 
ciples, which they discerned from the first, and which other 
nations have hardly known anything of, except as primarily 
derivative from them, they exemplified in that wonderful 
series of masterpieces, from Homer down to Plato and 
Aristotle and Demosthenes; a series of which we only see 
the fragments, but the mere fragments of which the rest of 
the world cannot match. Rome may have, more regal 
majesty ; modern Europe may be superior in wisdom, espe¬ 
cially in that wisdom of which the owl may serve as the 
emblem : but in the contest of Beauty no one could hesitate; 
the apple must be awarded to Greece. 

This is what I meant by speaking of the ao-neros aWrjp of 
Greek literature. The Greeks saw what they saw thoroughly. 
Their eyes were piercing ; and they knew how to use them, 
and to trust them. In modem literature on the other hand 
the pervading feeling is, that we see through a glass darkly. 
While with the Greeks the unseen world was the world of 
shadows, in the great works of modern times there is a more 
or less conscious feeling that the outward world of the eye is 
the world of shadows, that the tangled web of life is to be 
swept away, and that the invisible world is the only abode of 
true, living realities. How strongly is this illustrated by 
the contrast between the two great works which stand at the 
head of ancient and of Christian literature, the Homeric 
poems, and the Divina Gommedia ! While the former teem 
with life, like a morning in spring, and everything in them, 
as on such a morning, has its life raised to the highest pitch, 
Dante’s wanderings are all through the regions beyond the 
grave. He begins with overleaping death, and leaving it 
behind him ; and to his imagination the secret things of the 
next world, and its inhabitants, seem to be more distinctly 
and vividly present than the persons and things around him. 
Nor was Milton’s home on earth. And though Shakspeare’s 
was, it was not on an earth lying quietly beneath the clear, 
blue sky. How he drives the clouds over it! how he flashes 
across it! Ever and anon indeed he sweeps the clouds away, 











68 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


and shines down brightly upon it,—but only for a few 
moments together. Thus too has it been with all those in 
modern times whose minds have been so far opened as to see 
and feel the mystery of life. They have not shrunk from 
that mystery in reverent awe like the Greeks, nor planted a 
beautiful, impenetrable grove around the temple of the 
Furies. While the Greeks, as I said just now, could not 
dream of anatomizing life, we have anatomized everything : 
and whereas all their works are of the day, a large portion 
of ours might fitly be designated by the title of Night 
Thoughts. As to the frivolous triflers, who take things as 
they are, and skip about and sip the surface, they are no 
more to be reckoned into account in estimating the cha¬ 
racter of an age, than a man would take the flies and moths 
into account in drawing up an inventory of his chattels. 

Perhaps however the reason why modern literature has 
not had more of this serenity and brightness, is that it has 
so seldom been animated by the true spirit of Christianity 
in any high degree. A little knowledge will merely unsettle 
a man’s prejudices, without giving him anything better in 
their stead : and Christianity, intellectually as well as 
morally, unless it be indeed embraced with a longing and 
believing heart, serves only to make our darkness visible. 
The burning and shining lights of Christianity have rather 
been content to shine in the vallies : those on the hills have 
mostly been lights of this world, and therefore flaring and 
smoking. For individual Christians there are, individual 
Christians, I believe, there have been in all ages, whose 
spirits do indeed dwell in the midst of an aa-neros aWrjp. 
Nay, as Coleridge once said to me, “that in Italy the sky is 
so clear, you seem to see beyond the moon,” so are there 
those who seem to look beyond and through the heavens, 
into the very heaven of heavens. u. 

Thirlwall, in his History,—in which the Greeks have at 
length been called out of their graves by a mind combining 
their own clearness and grace with the wealth and power of 
modern learning and thought, and at whose call, as at that 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 69 

of a kindred spirit, they have therefore readily come forth, 
remarks, that Greece “is distinguisht among European 
countries by the same character which distinguishes Europe 
itself from the other continents,—the great range of its 
coast, compared with the extent of its surface.” The same 
fact, and its importance, are noticed by Frederic Schlegel in 
his second Lecture on the Philosophy of History. Nothing 
could be more favorable as a condition, not only of political 
and commercial, but also of intellectual greatness. Indeed 
this might be added to the long list of grounds for the 
truth of the Pindaric saying, apurrov pev vdap, and would 
suggest itself in an ode addrest to Hiero far more naturally 
and appropriately than the superiority of wine and water to 
wine ; a superiority which it may be a mark of barbarism to 
deny, but which few Englishmen would acknowledge. 

A similar extent of coast was also one of the great ad¬ 
vantages of Italy, and is now one of the greatest in the 
local condition of England. Goethe, who above all men had 
the talent of expressing profound and farstretching thoughts 
in the simplest words, and whose style has more of light in- 
it, with less of lightning, than any other writer’s since 
Plato, has thrown out a suggestion in one of his reviews 
(vol. xlv. p. 227), that “perhaps it is the sight of the sea 
from youth upward, that gives English and Spanish poets 
such an advantage over those of inland countries.” He 
spoke on this point from his own feelings : for he himself 
never saw the sea, till he went to Italy in his 38th year : 
and it is ingeniously remarkt by Francis Horn, though 
apparently without reference to Goethe’s observation, in his 
History of German Poetry and Eloquence (iii. p. 225), that 
“ whatever is indefinite, or seems so, is out of keeping with 
Goethe’s whole frame of mind : everything with him is 
terra jirma or an island : there is nothing of the infinitude 
of the sea. This conviction (he adds) forced itself upon me, 
when for the first time, at the northermost extremity of 
Germany, I felt the sweet thrilling produced by the highest 
sublimity of Nature. Here Shakspeare alone comes forward, 
whom one finds everywhere, on mountains and in vallies, in 



70 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


forests, by the side of rivers and of brooks. Thus far 
Goethe may accompany him : but in sight of the sea, and of 
such rocks on the sea, Shakspeare is by himself.” Solger 
too, in one of his letters (i. p. 320), when speaking of his 
first sight of the sea, says, “ Here for the first time I felt the 
impression of the illimitable, as produced by an object of 
sense, in its full majesty.” 

To us, who have been familiar with the Sea all our lives, 
it might almost seem as though our minds would have been 
“ poor shrunken things,” without its air to brace and expand 
them,—if for instance we had never seen the avrjpiOfxov yeXacrpa 
of the waves, as Aphrodite rises from their bosom,—if we 
had never heard the many-voiced song with which the Nereids 
now hymn the bridal, now bewail the bereavement of Thetis, 
—if we knew not how changeful the Sea is, and yet how 
constant and changeless amid all the changes of the seasons, 
—if we knew not how powerful she is, whom Winter with all 
his chains can no more bind than Xerxes could, how powerful 
to destroy in her fury, how far more powerful to bless in her 
calmness,—if we had never learnt the lesson of obedience 
and of order from her, the lesson of ceaseless activity, and of 
deep, unfathomable rest,—if we had no sublunary teacher 
but the mute, motionless earth,—if we had been deprived of 
this ever faithful mirror of heaven. The Sea appears to be 
the great separater of nations, the impassable barrier to all 
intercourse : dissodabilis the Koman poet calls it. Yet in 
fact it is the grand medium of intercourse, the chief uniter 
of mankind, the only means by which the opposite ends of 
the earth hold converse as though they were neighbours. 
Thus in divers ways the irovros arpvyeros has become even 
more productive, than if fields of corn were waving all 
over it. 

That it has been an essential condition in the civilizing of 
nations, all history shews. Perhaps the Germans in our 
days are the first people who have reacht any high degree of 
culture,—who have become eminent in poetry and in 
thought,—without its immediate aid. Yet Germany has 
been called “she of the Danube and the Northern Sea;” 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


71 


and might still more justly be called she of the Rhine . For 
the Danube, not bringing her into connexion with the sea, 
has had a less powerful influence on her destinies : whereas 
the Rhine has acted a more important part in her history, 
than any river in that of any other country, except the 
Nile. 

Hence the example of Germany will not enable us to 
conceive how such a people as Ulysses was to go in search 
of, — oi ovk icracn 6a\acrcrav *Ai/epey, ovbe & aXecrct fiepiypevov 
ddap edovaiv ,—how those who, not knowing the sea, have no 
salt to season their thoughts with,—how the Russians for 
instance can ever become civilized ; notwithstanding what 
Peter tried to effect, from a partial consciousness of this 
want, by building his capital on the Baltic. Still less can 
one imagine how the centre of Asia, or of Africa, can ever 
emerge out of barbarism; unless indeed the Steam-king be 
destined hereafter to effect, what the Water-king in his 
natural shape cannot. Genius or knowledge, springing up 
in those regions, would be like a fountain in an oasis, unable 
to mingle with its kindred, and unite into a continuous 
stream. Or if such a thing as a stream were to be found 
there, it would soon be swallowed up and lost, from having 
no sea within reach to shape its course to. In the legends 
Neptune is represented as contending with Minerva for the 
honour of giving name to Athens, and with Apollo for the 
possession of Corinth. But in fact he wrought along with 
them,—and mighty was his aid,—in glorifying their favorite 
cities. 

There is also a further point of analogy between the 
position of Greece and that of England. Greece, lying on 
the frontier of Europe toward Asia, was the link of union 
between the two, the country in which the practical 
European understanding seized, and gave a living, pro¬ 
ductive energy to the primeval ideas of Asia. Her sons 
carried off Europa with her letters from Phenicia, and Medea 
with her magic from Colchis. When the Asiatics, attempting 
reprisals, laid hands on her Queen of Beauty, the whole 
nation arose, and sallied forth from their homes, and bore 








72 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


her back again in triumph : for to whom could she belong 
rightfully and permanently, except to a Greek ? If Io went 
from them into Egypt, it was to become the ancestress of 
Hercules. 

Now England in like manner is the frontier of Europe 
toward America, and the great bond of connexion between 
them. Through us the mind of the Old World passes into 
the New. What our intellectual office may be in this 
respect, will be seen hereafter, when it becomes more appa¬ 
rent and determinate, what the character of the American 
mind is to be. At present England is the country, where 
that depth and inwardness of thought, which seems to belong 
to the Germanic mind, has assumed the distinct, outward, 
positive form of the Roman. 

An intermixture of the same elements has also taken place 
in France, but with a very different result. In the English 
character, as in our language, the Teutonic or spiritual 
element has fortunately been predominant ; and so the two 
factors, have coalesced without detriment: while in France, 
where the Roman or formal element gained the upperhand, 
the consequence has been, that they have almost neutralized 
and destroyed each other. The ideas of the Germans waned 
into abstractions : the law and order of the Romans shriveled 
into rules and forms, which no idea can impregnate, but 
which every insurgent abstraction can overthrow. The 
externality of the classical spirit has worn away into mere 
i superficiality. The French character is indeed a character, 
stampt upon them from without. Their profoundest 
thoughts are bons mots. They are the only nation that ever 
existed, in which a government can be hist off the stage like 
a bad play, and in which its fall excites less consternation, 
than the violation of a fashion in dress. 

In truth the ease and composure with which the Revolu¬ 
tion of July 1830 was accomplisht, and by which almost 
everybody was so dazzled, notwithstanding the fearful lessons 
of forty years before,—when in like manner Satan appeared 
at first as an angel of light, and when all mankind were 
deluded, and worshipt the new-born fiend,—would have been 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 73 

deemed by a wise observer one of the saddest features about 
it. 0 let us bleed when we are wounded! let not our 
wounds close up, as if nothing had been cleft but a shadow ! 
It is better to bleed even to death, than to live without blood 
in our veins. And in truth blood will flow. If it does not 
flow in the field from principle, it is sure to flow in tenfold 
torrents by the guillotine, through that ferocity, which, when 
Law and Custom are overthrown, nothing but Principle can 
keep in check. Hearts and souls will bleed, or will fester 
and rot. 

A Frenchman might indeed urge, that his patron saint is 
related in the legend not to have felt the loss of his head, 
and to have walkt away after it had been cut off, just as well 
as if it had been standing on his shoulders. But where no 
miracle is in the case, it is only the lowest orders of creatures 
that are quite as brisk and lively after decapitation as 
before. 1836. u. 


I hate to see trees pollarded . . or nations. u. 

Europe was conceived to be on the point of dissolution. 
Burke heard the death-watch, and rang the alarm. A 
hollow sound past from nation to nation, like that which 
announces the splitting and breaking up of the ice in 
the regions around the Pole. Well! the politicians and 
economists, and the doctors in statecraft, resolved to avert 
the stroke of vengeance, not indeed by actions like those of 
the Curtii and Decii;—such actions are extravagant, and 
chivalrous, and superstitious, and patriotic, and heroic, and 
self-devoting, and unworthy and unseemly in men of sense, 
who know that selfishness is the only source of good ;—but 
by boiTowing a device from the Arabian fabulist. They 
seem to have thought they should appease, or at least weary 
out the minister of wrath, if they could get him to hear 
through their thousand and one Constitutions. u. 

From what was said just now about the French character, 
as a combination the factors of which have almost neutralized 






74 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

each other, it follows that the French are the very people 
for that mode of life and doctrine, which has become so 
notorious under the title of the juste milieu, and which aims 
at reconciling opposites by a mechanical, or at the utmost by 
a chemical, instead of an organical union. It is only in the 
latter, when acting together under the sway of a constraining 
higher principle, that powers, which, if left to themselves, 
thwart and battle against each other, can be made to bring 
forth peace and its fruits. According to the modem theory 
however, the best way of producing a new being is not by the 
marriage of the man and woman, but by taking half of each, 
and tying them one to the other. The result, it is true, will 
not have much life in it : but what does that matter ? It is 
manufactured in a moment : the whole work goes on before 
the eyes of the world : and the new creature is fullsized from 
the first. How stupid and impotent on the other hand is 
Nature ! who hides the germs and first stirrings of all life in 
darkness; who is always forced to begin with the minutest 
particles; and who can produce nothing great, except by 
slow and tedious processes of growth and assimilation. How 
tardily and snail-like she crawls about her task ! She never 
does anything per saltum. She cannot get to the end of her 
journey, as we can, in a trice, by a hop, a skip, and a jump. 
It takes her a thousand years to grow a nation, and thou¬ 
sands to grow a philosopher. 

Amen ! so be it! Man, when he is working consciously, 
does not know how to work imperceptibly. He cannot trust 
to Time, as Nature can, in the assurance that Time will 
work with her. For, while Time fosters and ripens Nature’s 
works, he only crumbles man’s. It is well imagined, that the 
creature whom Frankenstein makes, should be a huge 
monster. Being unable to impart a living power of growth 
and increase by any effort of our will or understanding, or 
except when we are content to act in subordination to 
Nature, we try, when we set about any work, on which we 
mean to pride ourselves as especially our own, to render it 
as big as we can; so that, size being our chief criterion of 
greatness, we may have the better warrant for falling down 



GUESSES AT TRUTH. 75 

and worshipping it. Thus Frankenstein’s man-monster is an 
apt type of the numerous, newfangled, hop-skip-and-jump 
Constitutions, which have been circulating about Europe for 
the last half century ; in which the old statesmanly practice 
of enacting new ordinances and institutions, as occasion after 
occasion arises, has been superseded by attempts to draw up 
a complete abstract code for all sorts of states, without 
regard to existing rights, usages, manners, feelings, to the 
necessities of the country, or the character of the people. 
Indeed the following description of the monster, when he 
first begins to move, might be regarded as a satire on the 
Constitution of 1791. “ His limbs were in proportion; and 

I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! His 
yellow skin scarcely covered the muscles and arteries beneath. 
His hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing,—his teeth of a 
pearly whiteness : but these only formed a more horrid con¬ 
trast with his watery eyes, which seemed almost of the same 
colour as their dun white sockets, his shriveled complexion, 
and straight, black lips.” So it is with abstract constitutions. 
Their fabricaters try to make their parts proportionate, and 
to pick out the most beautiful features for them : but there 
are muscular and arterial workings ever going on in the body 
of a nation, there is such an intermingling and convolution 
of passions, and feelings, and consciousnesses, and thoughts, 
and desires, and regrets, and sorrows, that no yellow parch¬ 
ment, which man can draw over, will cover or hide them. 
Though the more external and lifeless parts, the hair and 
teeth, which are so often artificial, may be bright and dazzling, 
—though the teeth especially may be well fitted for doing 
their work of destruction,—no art can give a living eye : 
upparcov 8’ ev a\rjuiais eppei 7 racr’ ’Afppobira. 

The man-monster’s cruelty too was of the same sort 
as that of the French constitution-mongers, and of their 
works; and it resulted from the same cause, the utter 
want of sympathy with man and the world, such as they 
are. The misfortune is, that we cannot get rid of them, 
as he was got rid of, by sending them to the North 
Pole ; although its ice would be an element very congenial 



76 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

to the minds that gave birth to them, and would form a 
fitting grave for monstrosities, which, starting up in the 
frozen zone of human nature, were crystallized from their 
cradle. 1836. u. 


The strength of a nation, humanly speaking, consists not 
in its population or wealth or knowledge, or in any other 
such heartless and merely scientific elements, but in the 
number of its proprietors. Such too, according to the most 
learned and wisest of historians, was the opinion of antiquity. 
“All ancient legislators (says Niebuhr, when speaking of 
Numa), and above all Moses, rested the result of their 
ordinances for virtue, civil order, and good manners, on 
securing landed property, or at least the hereditary posses¬ 
sion of land, to the greatest possible number of citizens.” 

They who are not aware of the manner in which national 
character and political institutions mutually act and are 
acted on, till they gradually mould each other, have never 
reflected on the theory of new shoes. Which leads me to 
remark, that modern constitution-mongers have shewn 
themselves as unskilful and inconsiderate in making shoes, 
as the old limping, sorefooted aristocracies of the Continent 
have been intractable and impatient in wearing them. The 
one insisted that the boot must fit, because, after the fashion 
of Laputa, it had been cut to diagram : the others would 
bear nothing on their feet in any degree hard or common. 
Leather is the natural covering of the hands : on them we will 
still wear it: on the legs it is ignoble and masculine. Any 
other sacrifice we are content to make: but our feet must con¬ 
tinue as heretofore, swathed up in fleecy hosiery, especially when 
we ride or walk. It is a reward we may justly claim for 
condescending to acts so toilsome. It is a privilege we have 
inherited, with the gout of our immortal ancestors; and we 
cannot in honour give it up. But you say, the privilege must 
be abolisht, because the commodity is scarce. Let the people 
then make their sacrifice, and give up stockings. 






GUESSES AT TRUTH. 77 

Beauty is perfection unmodified by a predominating 
expression. 

Song is the tone of feeling. Like poetry, the language of 
feeling, art should regulate, and perhaps temper and modify 
it. But whenever such a modification is introduced as 
destroys the predominance of the feeling,—which yet happens 
in ninety-nine settings out of a hundred, and with nine 
hundred and ninety-nine taught singers out of a thousand,— 
the essence is sacrificed to what should be the accident; and 
we get notes, but no song. 

If song however be the tone of feeling, what is beautiful 
singing ? The balance of feeling, not the absence of it. 

Close boroughs are said to be an oligarchal innovation on 
the ancient Constitution of England. But are not the forty¬ 
shilling freeholders, in their present state, a democratical 
innovation h The one may balance and neutralize the other; 
and if so, the Constitution will remain practically unaltered 
by the accession of these two new, opposite, and equal 
powers. Whereas to destroy the former innovation, without 
taking away the latter, must change the system of our polity 
in reality, as well as in idea. 1826. l. 

When the pit seats itself in the boxes, the gallery will 
soon drive out both, and occupy the whole of the house, a. 

In like manner, when the calculating, expediential Under¬ 
standing has superseded the Conscience and the Reason, the 
Senses soon rush out from their dens, and sweep away every¬ 
thing before them. If there be nothing brighter than the 
reflected light of the moon, the wild beasts will not keep in 
their lair. And when that moon, after having reacht a 
moment of apparent glory, by looking full at the sun, fancies 
it may turn away from the sun, and still have light in 
itself, it straightway begins to wane, and ere long goes out 
altogether, leaving its worshipers in the darkness, which 
they had vainly dreamt it would enlighten. This was seen 







73 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


in the Roman Empire. It was seen in the last century all 
over Europe, above all in France. u. 

He who does not learn from events, rejects the lessons of 
Experience. He who judges from the event, makes Fortune 
an assessor in his judgements. 

What an instance of the misclassifi cations and misconcep¬ 
tions produced by a general term is the common mistake, 
which looks on the Greeks and Romans as one and the same 
people, because they are both called ancients! 

The difference between desultory reading and a course of 
study may be illustrated by comparing the former to a 
number of mirrors set in a straight line, so that every one of 
them reflects a different object, the latter to the same 
mirrors so skilfully arranged as to perpetuate one set of 
objects in an endless series of reflexions. 

If we read two books on the same subject, the second 
leads us to review the statements and arguments of the 
first; the errours of which are little likely to escape this 
kind of proving, if I may so call it ; while the truths are 
more strongly imprinted on the memory, not merely by 
repetition,—though that too is of use,—but by the deeper 
conviction thus wrought into the mind, of their being verily 
and indeed truths. 

Would you restrict the mind then to a single line of 
study i 

No more than the body to any single kind of labour. 
The sure way of cramping and deforming both is to confine 
them entirely to an employment which keeps a few of their 
powers or muscles in strong, continuous action, leaving the 
rest to shrink and stiffen from inertness. Liberal exercise is 
necessary to both. For the mind the best perhaps is Poetry. 
Abstract truth, which in Science is ever the main object, has 
no link to attach our sympathies to man, nay, rather withers 
the fibres by which our hearts would otherwise lay hold on 
him, absorbing our affections, and diverting them from man, 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 79 

who, viewed in the concrete, and as he exists, is the antipode 
of abstract truth. High therefore and precious must be the 
worth and benefit of Poetry; which, taking men as indi¬ 
viduals, and shedding a strong light on the portions and 
degrees of truth latent in every human feeling, reconciles us 
to our kind, and shews that a devotion to truth, however it 
may alienate the mind from man, only unites it more 
affectionately to men, in their various relations of love (for 
love is truth), as children, and fathers, and husbands, and 
citizens, and, one day perhaps much more than it has 
hitherto done, as Christians. 

Vice is the greatest of all Jacobins, the arch-leveler. 

A democracy by a natural process degenerates into an 
ochlocracy : and then the hangman has the fairest chance of 
becoming the autocrat. a. 

Many of the supposed increasers of knowledge have only 
given a new name, and often a worse, to what was well 
known before. u. 

God did not make harps, nor pirouettes, nor crayon¬ 
drawing, nor the names of all the great cities in Africa, nor 
conchology, nor the Contes Moraux, and a proper command 
of countenance, and prudery, and twenty other things of the 
sort. They must all be taught then; or how is a poor girl 
to know anything about them 1 

But health, strength, the heart, the soul, with their 
fairest inmates, modesty, cheerfulness, truth, purity, fond 
affection,—all these things He did make ; and so they may 
safely be left to Nature. Nobody can suppose it to be 
mamma’s fault, if they don’t come of themselves. 

How fond man is of tinsel! I have known a boy steal, to 
give away. A * 

Offenders may be divided into two classes,—the old in 









80 


GUESSES AT TEUTH. 


crime, and the young. The old and hardened criminal, in 
becoming so, must have acquired a confidence in his own 
fate-fencedness, or, as he would call it, his luck. The young 
then are the only offenders whom the law is likely to intimi¬ 
date. Now to these imprisonment or transportation cannot 
but look much less formidable, when they see it granted as a 
commutation, instead of being awarded as a penalty. It is 
no longer transportation, but getting off with transportation : 
and doubtless it is often urged in this shape on the novice, 
as an argument for crime. So that in all likelihood the 
threat of death, in cases where it can rarely be executed, is 
worse than nugatory, and positively pernicious. 

These remarks refer chiefly to such laws as are still con¬ 
tinually violated. With those, which, having accomplisht 
the purpose they were framed for, live only in the character 
of the people, let no reformer presume to meddle, until he 
has studied and refuted Col. Frankland’s Speech on Sir 
Samuel Romillys Rills for making alteratims in the Criminal 
Law. 1826. 


It is an odd device, when a fellow commits a crime, to 
send him to the antipodes for it. Could one shove him 
thither in a straight line, down a tunnel, he might bring 
back some useful hints to certain friends of mine, who are 
just now busied in asking mother Earth what she is made 
of. But that a rogue, by picking a pocket, should earn the 
circuit of half the globe, seems really meant as a parody on 
the conceptions of those who hold that the happiness of a 
future life will consist mainly in going the round of all the 
countries they have not visited in the present. Unless 
indeed our legislators fancy that, by setting a man topsy¬ 
turvy, they may give his better qualities, which have hitherto 
been opprest by the weight of evil passions and habits, a 
chance of coming to the top. 

How ingeniously contrived this plan is, to render punish¬ 
ments expensive and burthensome to the state that inflicts 
them, is notorious. Let this pass however : we must not 
grudge a little money, when a great political good is to be 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


81 


effected. True, it would be much cheaper and more 
profitable to employ our convicts in hard labour at home. 
Far easier too would it be to keep them under moral and 
religious discipline. But how could Botany Bay go on, 
if the importation of vice were put a stop to 1 For, as there 
is nothing too bad to manure a new soil with, so, reasoning 
by analogy, no scoundrels can be too bad to people a new 
land with. The argument halts a little, and seems to be 
clubfooted, and is assuredly topheavy. In all well-ordered 
towns the inhabitants are compelled to get rid of their own 
dirt, in such a way that it shall not be a nuisance to the 
neighbourhood. It is singular that the English, of all nations 
the nicest on this point, should in their political capacity 
deem it justifiable and seemly to toss the dregs and feces of 
the community into the midst of their neighbour’s estate. 

Deportation, as the French termed it, for political offenses 
may indeed at times be expedient, and beneficial, and just. 
For a man’s being a bad subject in one state is no proof that 
he may not become a good subject under other rulers and a 
different form of government. More especially in this age 
of insurrectionary spirits,—when the old maxim, which may 
occasionally have afforded a sanctuary for establisht abuses, 
has been converted into its far more dangerous opposite, 
that whatever is, is wrong ,—there may easily be persons who 
from incompatibility of character cannot live peaceably in 
their own country, yet who may have energy and zeal to fit 
them for taking an active part in a new order of things. 
Such was the origin of many of the most flourishing Greek 
colonies. Men of stirring minds who found no place in 
accord with their wishes at home, went in search of other 
homes, carrying the civilization and the glory of the mother 
country into all the regions around. Something of the 
same spirit gave rise to the settlements of the Normans in 
the middle ages. In this way too states may be formed, 
great from the power of the moral principle which cements 
them. In this way were those states formed, which, above 
all the nations of the earth, have reason to glory in then- 
origin, New England, and Pensylvania. 


G 












82 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

But transportation for moral offenses is in every point of 
view impolitic, injurious, and unjust. “ Plantations (says 
Bacon, speaking of Colonies) are amongst ancient, primitive, 
and heroical works.—It is a shameful and unblessed thing, 
to take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men, to 
be the people with whom you plant. And not only so ; but 
it spoileth the plantation : for they will ever live like rogues, 
and not fall to work, but be lazy, and do mischief, and spend 
victuals, and be quickly weary, and then certify over to their 
country to the discredit of the plantation.” Yet, in defiance 
of this warning from him, whom we profess to revere as the 
father of true philosophy, and the “wisest of mankind,” we 
have gone on for the last half century peopling the new 
quarter of the world with the refuse of the gallows; as 
though we conceived that in morals also two negatives were 
likely to make an affirmative,—that the coacervation of filth, 
if the mass be only huge enough, would of itself ferment 
into purity,—and that every paradox might be lookt for in 
the country of the ornithorynchus paradoxus. Bacon’s words 
however have been fulfilled, in this as in so many other 
cases : for the prophet of modern science was gifted with a 
still more piercing vision into the hearts and thoughts of 
men. What indeed could be expected of a people so utterly 
destitute of that which is the most precious part of a 
nation’s inheritance,—of that which has ever been one of the 
most powerful human stimulants to generous exertion,—the 
glory of its ancestors 1 What could be expected of a people 
who, instead of glory, have no inheritance but shame 1 For 
it will hardly be argued in these days, that the Bomans, who 
reacht the highest pitch of earthly grandeur, sprang origi¬ 
nally from a horde of bandits and outlaws. That fable may 
be regarded as exploded : and assuredly there never was a 
nation, in whom the glory of their ancestors w r as so lively 
and mighty a principle, as among the Bomans. But not 
content with the ignominy of the original settlement, 
though we ought to know that disease is ever much more 
contagious than health, we yearly send out a number of 
plague-ships, as they may in truth be called, for fear lest 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 83 

the sanitary condition of our Australian colonies should 
improve. 

If any persons are to be selected by preference for the 
peopling of a new country, they ought rather to be the most 
temperate, the most prudent, the most energetic, the most 
virtuous, in the whole nation. For their task is the most 
arduous, requiring Wisdom to put forth all her strength and 
all her craft for its worthy execution. Their responsibility is 
the most weighty ; seeing that upon them the character of a 
whole people for ages will mainly depend. And they will find 
much to dishearten them, much to draw them astray; without 
being protected against their own hearts, and upheld and 
fortified in their better resolves, as in a regularly constituted 
state all men are in some measure, by the healthy and cordial 
influences of Law and Custom and Opinion. 0 that states¬ 
men would consider what a glorious privilege they enjoy, 
when they are allowed to become the fathers of a new 
people ! This however seems to be one of the things which 
God has reserved wholly to himself. 

Yet how enormous are the means with which the 
circumstances of England at this day supply her for 
colonization ! How weighty therefore is the duty which falls 
upon her! With her population overflowing in every 
quarter, with her imperial fleets riding the acknowledged 
lords of every sea, mistress of half the islands in the globe, 
and of an extent of coast such as no other nation ever ruled 
over, her manifest calling is to do that over the Atlantic 
and the Pacific, which Greece did so successfully in the 
Mediterranean and the Euxine. As Greece girt herself 
round with a constellation of Greek states, so ought England 
to throw a girdle of English states round the world,—to 
plant the English language, the English character, English 
knowledge, English manliness, English freedom, above all 
to plant the Cross, ’wherever she hoists her flag, wherever 
the simple natives bow to her armipotent sceptre. We have 
been highly blest with a glory above that of other nations. 
Of the paramounts in the various realms of thought during 
the last three centuries, many of the greatest have been of 



84 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

our blood. Our duty therefore is to spread our glory abroad, 
to let our light shine from East to West, and from Pole to 
Pole,—to do what in us lies, that Shakspeare and Milton 
and Bacon and Hooker and Newton may be familiar and 
honoured names a thousand years hence, among every people 
that hears the voice of the sea. 

Of this duty we have been utterly regardless; because 
we have so long been regardless of a still higher duty. For 
our duties hang in such a chain, one from the other, and all 
from heaven, that he who fulfills the highest, is likely to 
fulfill the rest ; while he who neglects the highest, whereby 
alone the others are upheld, will probably let the rest draggle 
in the mire. We have long been unmindful, as a nation, of 
that which in our colonial policy we ought to deem our 
highest duty, the duty of planting the colonies of Christ. 
We have thought only of planting the colonies of Mammon, 
not those of Christ, nor even those of Minerva and Apollo. 
Nay, till very lately we sent out our colonists, not so much 
to christianize the Heathens, as to be heathenized by them : 
and when a Christian is heathenized, then does the saying 
come to pass in all its darkness and woe, that the last state 
of such a man is worse than the first. 

Let us cast our thoughts backward. Of all the works of 
all the men who were living eighteen hundred years ago, 
what is remaining now ? One man was then lord of half the 
known earth. In power none could vie with him, in the 
wisdom of this world few. He had sagacious ministers, and 
able generals. Of all his works, of all theirs, of all the 
works of the other princes and rulers in those ages, what is 
left now 1 Here and there a name, and here and there a 
ruin. Of the works of those who wielded a mightier weapon 
than the sword, a weapon that the rust cannot eat away so 
rapidly, a weapon drawn from the armory of thought, some 
still live and act, and are cherisht and revered by the learned. 
The range of their influence however is narrow : it is con¬ 
fined to few, and even in them mostly to a few of their 
meditative, not of their active hours. But at the same time 
there issued from a nation, among the most despised of the 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 85 

earth, twelve poor men, with no sword in their hands, scantily 
supplied with the stores of human learning or thought. 
They went forth East, and West, and North, and South, into 
all quarters of the world. They were reviled : they were 
spit upon : they were trampled under foot: every engine of 
torture, every mode of death, was employed to crush them. 
And where is their work now ? It is set as a diadem on the 
brows of the nations. Their voice sounds at this day in all 
parts of the earth. High and low hear it: kings on their 
thrones bow down to it : senates acknowledge it as their 
law : the poor and afflicted rejoice in it : and as it has 
triumpht over all those powers which destroy the works of 
man,—as, instead of falling before them, it has gone on age 
after age increasing in power and in glory,—so is it the only 
voice which can triumph over Death, and turn the King of 
terrours into an angel of light. 

Therefore, even if princes and statesmen had no higher 
motive than the desire of producing works which are to last, 
and to bear their names over the waves of time, they should 
aim at becoming the fellowlabourers, not of Tiberius and 
Sejanus, nor even of Augustus and Agrippa, but of Peter 
and Paul. Their object should be, not to build monuments 
which crumble away and are forgotten, but to work among 
the builders of that which is truly the Eternal City. For so 
too will it be eighteen hundred years hence, if the world lasts 
so long. Of the works of our generals and statesmen, 
eminent as several of them have been, all traces will have 
vanisht. Indeed of him who was the mightiest among 
them, all traces have well-nigh vanisht already. For they 
who deal in death, are mostly given up soon to death, they 
and their works. Of our poets and philosophers some may 
still survive ; and many a thoughtful youth in distant 
regions may repair for wisdom to the fountains of Burke and 
Wordsworth. But the works which assuredly will live, and 
be great and glorious, are the works of those poor, unregarded 
men, who have gone forth in the spirit of the twelve from 
Judea, whether to India, to Africa, to Greenland, or to the 
isles in the Pacific. As their names are written in the Book 



86 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


of Life, so are their works : and it may be that the noblest 
memorial of England in those days will be the Christian 
empire of New Zealand. 

This is one of the many ways in which God casts down 
the mighty, and exalts the humble and meek. Through 
His blessing there have been many men amongst us of late 
years, whose works will live as long as the world, and far 
longer. But, as a nation, the very Heathens will rise up in 
the judgement against us, and condemn us. For they, when 
they sent out colonies, deemed it their first and highest duty 
to hallow the newborn state by consecrating it to their 
national god : and they were studious to preserve the tie of 
a common religion and a common worship, as the most 
binding and lasting of all ties, between the mother-country 
and its offspring. Now so inherent is permanence in religion, 
so akin is it to eternity, that the monuments even of a false 
and corrupt religion will outlast every other memorial of its 
age and people. With what power does this thought come 
upon us when standing amid the temples of Paestum ! All 
other traces of the people who raised them have been swept 
away : the very materials of the buildings that once sur¬ 
rounded them have vanisht, one knows not how or whither : 
the country about is a wide waste : the earth has become 
barren with age : Nature herself seems to have grown old 
and died there. Yet still those mighty columns lift up their 
heads toward heaven, as though they too were “ fashioned to 
endure the assault of Time with all his hours and still 
one gazes through them at the deep-blue sea and sky, and at 
the hills of Amalfi on the opposite coast of the bay. A day 
spent among those temples is never to be forgotten, whether 
as a vision of unimagined sublimity and beauty, or as a 
lesson how the glory of all man’s works passes away, and 
nothing of them abides, save that which he gives to God. 
When Mary anointed our Lord’s feet, the act was a transient 
one : it was done for His burial: the holy feet which she 
anointed, ceast soon after to walk on earth. Yet he declared 
that, wheresoever His gospel was preacht in the whole world , 
that act should also be told as a memorial of her . So has it 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


87 


ever been with what has been given to God, albeit blindly 
and erringly. While all other things have perisht, this has 
endured. 

The same doctrine is set forth in the colossal hieroglyphics 
of Girgenti and Selinus. At Athens too what are the build¬ 
ings which two thousand years of slavery have failed to 
crush 1 The temple of Theseus, and the Parthenon. Man, 
when working for himself, has ever felt that so perishable a 
creature may well be content with a perishable shell. On 
the other hand, when he is working for those whom his belief 
has enthroned in the heavens, he strives to make his works 
worthy of them, not only in grandeur and in beauty, but 
also in their imperishable, indestructible massiness and 
strength. Moreover Time himself seems almost to shrink 
from an act of sacrilege ; and Nature ever loves to beautify 
the ruined house of God. 

It is not however by the Heathens alone that the propa¬ 
gation of their religion in their colonies has been deemed a 
duty. Christendom in former days was animated by a like 
principle. In the joy excited by the discovery of America, 
one main element was, that a new province would thereby 
be won for the Kingdom of Christ. This feeling is exprest 
in the old patents for our Colonies : for instance, in that for 
the plantation of Virginia, James the First declares his 
approval of “ so noble a work, which may by the providence 
of Almighty God hereafter tend to the glory of His Divine 
Majesty, in propagating the Christian religion to such people 
as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true 
knowledge and worship of God.” For nations, as well as 
individuals, it might often be wisht, that the child were 
indeed “ father of the man.” u. 


In republishing a work like this after intervals of ten and 
twenty years, it must needs be that a writer will meet now 
and then with thoughts, which, in their mode of expression 
at least, belong more or less to the past, and which in one 
way or other have become out of keeping with the present. 
If his watch pointed to the right hour twenty years ago, it 




88 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

must be behind time in some respects now. For in addition 
to the secular precession of the equinoxes in the intellectual 
world, each year advances a day ; and ever and anon comes 
a leap-year, with an unlookt-for intercalation. Even in the 
writer’s own mind, unless he has remained at a standstill, 
while all things else have been in motion,—and in that case 
he can never have had much real life in him,—subsequent 
reflexion and experience must have expanded and matured 
some opinions, and modified or corrected others. In his 
relation to the outward world too there must be changes. 
Truth will have gained ground in some quarters : in others 
the prevalent forms of errour will be different, perchance 
opposite. Opinions, which were just coming out of the shell, 
or newly fledged, will have reacht their prime, and be flying 
abroad from mouth to mouth, from journal to journal. He 
who has sought truth with any earnestness, will at times 
have the happy reward,—among the pleasures of authorship 
one of the greatest,—of finding that thoughts, which in his 
younger days were in the germ, or just sprouting up, or 
budding forth, have since ripened and seeded,—that truths, 
of which he may have caught a dim perception, and for 
which he may have contended with the ardour inspired by a 
struggle in behalf of what is unduly neglected, are more or 
less generally recognised,—and, it may even be, that wishes, 
which, when first uttered, seemed visionary, have assumed a 
distincter shape, and come forward above the horizon of 
practical reality. 

Thus, in revising these Guesses of former years for a third 
edition, I am continually reminded of the differences between 
1847 and 1827, and these not solely lying within the compass 
of my own mind. Nor is it uninteresting to have such a 
series of landmarks pointing out where the waters have 
advanced, and where they have receded. For instance, the 
observations in pp. 28—31 pertain to a time when the old 
Poorlaw, after its corruptions through the thoughtlessness of 
our domestic policy during the French War, was exciting the 
reprobation, which has since been poured out, with less 
reason and more clamour, on its successor. At that time 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


89 


our ministers, one after another, shrank from the dangers 
which were foreboded from a change; and this should be 
borne in mind, though it is mostly forgotten, when the new 
Poorlaw is tried. It should be remembered that, whatever 
evils may have ensued, they are immeasurably less than 
were anticipated. Yet, though the wish exprest above for 
the correction of the old Poorlaw has in some respects been 
fulfilled, very little has been done in the view there proposed 
for elevating the character of our labouring classes. That 
which was to relieve the purses of the land-owners, has been 
effected. As to the substitutes requisite in order to preserve 
the aged and infirm from want, and to foster the feeling of 
self-dependence and self-respect, they are still problems for 
the future. 

Again, there is now a cheering hope that what is spoken 
of in these latter pages as the object of a dim, though 
earnest wish, will at last be accomplisht. More than two 
centuries have rolled by since Bacon lifted up his oracular 
voice against the evils of Penal Colonies. The experience of 
every generation since has strengthened his protest. During 
the last twenty years those Colonies have been the seats of 
simple, defecated vice, and have teemed with new, monstrous 
births of crime. It could not be otherwise, when a people 
was doomed to grow up as a mere festering mass of corrup¬ 
tion, and when the healthier influences of Nature were con¬ 
tinually counteracted by the importation of new stores of 
pestilential matter, as though a hell were continually receiv¬ 
ing fresh cargoes of fiends to stock it. At last however our 
ministers have been stirred with a desire to abate and abolish 
this tremendous evil. A few years after the utterance of the 
wish recorded above (in pp. 80—83), the Archbishop of 
Dublin, in two Letters to the late Lord Grey, exposed the 
mischiefs of Penal Colonies with unanswerable cogency and 
clearness ; and now the son of that Lord Grey has been 
awakened to a consciousness of the guilt incurred by Eng¬ 
land in maintaining those Colonies, and of our duty to 
abandon a policy which is planting a new nation out of the 
refuse of mankind. May God prosper his attempt, and 



90 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

bring it to a happy issue ! May our legislators neither be 
daunted nor deluded by those who assert that* such abomina¬ 
tions are a necessary safety-valve for the crimes of England ! 

It is sad indeed that so many of our Judges should uphold 
the expediency of transportation, in defiance of such appal¬ 
ling facts. But so it ever is with establisht abuses. Too 
many good men are apt to put on the trammels of Custom, 
and to fancy that one cannot walk without them. While 
the ingenious are ever liable to be ensnared by their own 
ingenuity, even those who have shewn great ability and 
integrity in working out the details of a system, though 
they may be quick in perceiving and removing partial ble¬ 
mishes, will be very slqw to recognise and acknowledge the 
whole system to be vicious. Moreover, through that feeble¬ 
ness of imagination, and that bluntness of moral sympathies, 
which we all have to deplore, when an evil is once removed 
from sight, it almost ceases to disturb us; so that, provided 
our criminals are prevented from breaking the peace in 
England, we think little of what they may do, or of what 
may become of them, at the opposite end of the Globe. 
Nevertheless they who stand on that high ground, whence 
Principle and Expediency are ever seen to coincide,—if they 
cling to this conviction, and are resolute in carrying it into 
act,—may be sure that, after a while, all those whose appro¬ 
bation is worth having,—even they who may have kept aloof, 
or have laid great stress on scruples and objections in the 
first instance through timidity or narrowmindedness,—will 
join in swelling their song of triumph, and in condemning 
the abuse which they themselves may long have regarded as 
indispensable to the preservation of social order. 

We have an additional ground too for thankfulness, in the 
higher and wiser notions concerning the duties of Coloni¬ 
zation which have been gaining currency of late, and to which 
the attention of our Legislature has been especially called 
by Mr. Buller in some excellent speeches. Hence we may 
hope that ere long our Government will seriously endeavour 
to redeem this vast province from the dominion of Chance, 
and will try to substitute an organic social polity for the 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 91 

vague confluence of appetites and passions by which our 
Colonies have mostly been peopled. 

Above all have we reason for giving thanks to Him who 
has at length roused our Church to a deeper consciousness of 
her duties in this region also. Among the events and mea¬ 
sures of the last twenty years, I know none which hold out 
such a rich promise of blessings, or which seem already to 
project their roots so far into the heart of distant ages, as that 
which has been done for the better organization and ordering 
of the Church of Christ in our Colonial Empire. 1847. u. 

Once on a time there was a certain country, in which 
from local reasons, the land could be divided no way so con¬ 
veniently as into foursided figures. A mathematician, hav¬ 
ing remarkt this, ascertained the laws of all such figures, and 
laid them down fully and accurately. His countrymen learnt 
to esteem him a philosopher; and his precepts were observed 
religiously for years. A convulsion of nature at length 
changed the face and local character of the district : where¬ 
upon a skilful surveyor, being employed to lay out some fields 
afresh, ventured to give one of them five sides. The inno¬ 
vation is talkt of universally, and is half applauded by some 
younger and bolder members of the community : but a big¬ 
mouthed and weighty doctor, to set the matter at rest for 
ever, quotes the authority of the above-mentioned mathe¬ 
matician, that fixer of agricultural positions , and grand land¬ 
mark of posterity , who has demonstrated to the weakest 
apprehensions that a field ought never to have more than 
four sides : and then he proves, to the satisfaction of all his 
hearers, that a pentagon has more. 

This weighty doctor is one of a herd : everybody knows 
he cannot tell how many such. Among them are the critics, 
“ who feel by rule, and think by precedent.” To instance 
only in the melody of verse : nothing can be clearer than 
that a polysyllabic language will fall into different cadences 
from a language which abounds in monosyllables. The cha¬ 
racter of languages too in this respect often varies greatly 
with their age : for they usually drop many syllables behind 




92 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

them in their progress through time. Yet we continually 
hear the rule-and-precedent critics condemning verses for 
differing from the rhythms of former days; just as though 
there could only be one good tune in metre. 


For the motive of a man’s actions, hear his friend ; for 
their prudence and propriety, his enemy. In our every-day 
judgements we are apt to jumble the two together; if we see 
an action is unwise, accusing it of being ill-intentioned ; and, 
if we know it to be well-intentioned, persuading ourselves it 
must be wise; both foolishly ; the first the most so. 


Abuse I would use, were there use in abusing ; 

But now ’tis a nuisance you ’ll lose by not losing. 

So reproof, were it proof, I ’d approve your reproving; 
But, until it improves, you should rather love loving. 


How few Christians have imbibed the spirit of their Mas¬ 
ter’s beautiful and most merciful parable of the tares, which 
the servants are forbidden to pluck up, lest they should root 
up the wheat along with them ! Never have men been 
wanting, who come, like the servants, and give notice of the 
tares, and ask leave to go and gather them up. Alas too ! 
even in that Church, which professes to follow Jesus, and calls 
itself after His sacred name, the ruling principle has often 
been to destroy the tares, let what will come of the wheat; 
nay, sometimes to destroy the wheat, lest a tare should per¬ 
chance be left standing. Indeed I know not who can be said 
to have acted even up to the letter of this command, unless 
it be'authors toward their own works. u. 


It is not without a whimsical analogy to polemical fulmi- 
nations, that great guns are loaded with iron, pistols and 
muskets fire lead, rapidly, incessantly, fatiguingly, and ninety- 
nine times out of a hundred, they say, without effect. 

Knowledge is the parent of love ; Wisdom, love itself. 

They who are sinking in the world, find more weights than 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 93 

corks ready to attach themselves to them ; and even if they 
can lay hold on a bladder, it is too likely to burst before it 
raises their heads above water. A 


The independence of the men who buy their seats,—a 
foreiner would think I am speaking of a theatre,—is often 
urged by the opposers of Parliamentary Eeform as an 
advantage resulting from the present system. And inde¬ 
pendent those gentlemen certainly are, at least of the people 
of England, whose interests they have in charge. But the par¬ 
liamentary balance has two ends \ and shewing that a certain 
body of members are not dependent on the people, will hardly 
pass for proof that they are not hangers on at all. Independent 
then is not the fit term to describe these members by : the 
plain and proper word is irresponsible. Now their being so 
may be unavoidable, may even be desirable for the sake of 
some contingent good. But can it be good in itself, and for 
itself? can it be a thing to boast of? Observe, we are 
talking of representatives, not of peers, or king. 1826. 

In proportion as each word stands for a separate concep¬ 
tion, language comes nearer to the accuracy and unimpres¬ 
siveness of algebraic characters, so useful when the particular 
links in a chain of reasoning have no intrinsic value, and are 
important only as connecting the premisses with the conclu¬ 
sion. But circumlocutions magnify details j and their march 
being sedate and stately, the mind can keep pace with them, 
yet not run itself out of breath. In the due mixture of 
these two modes, lies the secret of an argumentative style. 
As a general rule, the first should prevail more in writing, 
the last in speaking; circumlocution being to words, what 
repetition is to arguments. The first too.is the fitter dress 
for a short logical sentence, the last for a long one, in which 
the feelings are any wise appealed to ; though to recommend 
in the same breath, that shortness should be made still 
shorter, and that length should be lengthened, may sound 
paradoxical. 

Yet this amounts to much the same thing with the old 





94 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Stoic illustration. Zeno, says Cicero ( Orat . 32), “ manu 
demonstrare solebat, quid inter dialecticos et oratores inter-* 
esset. Nam cum compresserat digitos, pugnumque fecerat, 
dialecticam aiebat ejusmodi esse : cum autem diduxerat, et 
manum dilataverat, palmae illius similem eloquentiam esse 
dicebat.” With an evident reference to this illustration, 
Fuller {Holy State, B. II. c. 5) says of Campian, that he was 
“ excellent at the flat hand of rhetoric, which rather gives 
pats than blows; but he could not bend his fist to dispute.” 


Oratory may be symbolized by a warrior’s eye, flashing 
from under a philosopher’s brow. But why a warrior’s eye, 
rather than a poet’s 1 Because in oratory the will must pre¬ 
dominate. _ 

To talk without effort is after all the great charm of 
talking. _ 

The proudest word in English, to judge by its way of 
carrying itself, is I. It is the least of monosyllables, if it be 
indeed a syllable : yet who in good society ever saw a little 
one ? 

Foreiners find it hard to understand the importance 
which every wellbred Englishman, as in duty bound, attaches 
to himself. They cannot conceive why, whenever they have 
to speak in the first person, they must stand on tiptoe, lifting 
themselves up, until they tower, like Ajax, with head and 
shoulders above their comrades. Hence in their letters, as 
in those of the uneducated among our own countrymen, we 
now and then stumble on a little i, with a startling shock, 
as on coming to a short step in a flight of stairs. A French¬ 
man is too courteous and polisht to thrust himself thus at 
full length into his neighbour’s face : he makes a bow, and 
sticks out his tail. Indeed this big one-lettered pronoun is 
quite peculiar to John Bull, as much so as Magna Charta, 
with which perchance it may not be altogether unconnected. 
At least it certainly is an apt symbol of our national charac- 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 95 

ter, both in some of its nobler and of its harsher features. 
In it you may discern the Englishman’s freedom, his unbend¬ 
ing firmness, his straightforwardness, his individuality of 
character : you may also see his self-importance, his arro¬ 
gance, his opiniativeness, his propensity to separate and 
seclude himself from his neighbours, and to look down on all 
mankind with contempt. As he has bared his representative 
I of its consonants and adjuncts, in like manner has he also 
stript his soul of its consonants, of those social and affable 
qualities, which smoothe the intercourse between man and 
man, and by the help of which people unite readily one with 
another. Look at four Englishmen in a stage-coach: the 
odds are, they will be sitting as stiff and unsociable as four 
Ies. 1STovalis must have had some vision of this sort in his 
mind, when he said (vol. iii. p. 301) : “ Every Englishman is 
an island.” 

But is I a syllable h It has hardly a better claim to the 
title, than Orson, before he left the woods, had to be called 
a family. By the by, they who would derive all language 
from simple sounds, by their juxtaposition and accumulation, 
and all society from savages, who are to unite under the 
influence of mutual repulsion, may perceive in I and Orson, 
that the isolated state is as likely to be posterior to the 
social, as to be anterior. You have only to strip vowels of 
their consonants, man of his kindly affections, which are 
sure to dry up of themselves, and to drop off, when they 
have nothing to act on. Death crumbles its victims into 
dust : but dust has no power in itself to coalesce into 


Perhaps the peculiar self-importance of our I may number 
among the reasons why our writers nowadays are so loth to 
make use of it; as though its mere utterance were a mark 
of egotism. This over-jealous watchfulness betrays that 
there must be something unsound. In simpler times, before 
our selfconsciousness became so sensitive and irritable, people 
were not afraid of saying /, when occasion arose : and they 
never dreamt that their doing so could be an offense to their 











96 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


neighbours. But now we eschew it by all manner of shifts. 
"VVe multiply, we dispersonate ourselves : we turn ourselves 
outside in. We are ready to become he, she, it, they, any¬ 
thing rather than I. 

A tribe of writers are fond of merging their individuality 
in a multitudinous we. They think they may pass them¬ 
selves off unnoticed, like the Irishman’s bad guinea, in a 
handful of halfpence. This is one of the affectations with 
which the literature of the day is tainted, a trick caught, or 
at least much fostered, by the habit of writing in Reviews. 
Now in a Review,—which, among divers other qualities of 
Cerberus, has that of many-headedness, and the writers in 
which speak in some measure as the members of a junto,— 
the plural we is warrantable; provided it be not thrust 
forward, as it so often is, to make up for the want of argu¬ 
ment by the show of authority. This distinction is justly 
drawn by Chateaubriand, in the preface to his Memoir on 
the Congress of Yerona : “ En parlant de moi, je me suis 
tour-a-tour servi des pronoms nous et je; nous comme 
representant d’une opinion, je quand il m’arrive d’etre per- 
sonnellement en scene, ou d’exprimer un sentiment indi- 
viduel. Le moi choque par son orgueil; le nous est un peu 
janseniste et royal.” 

Still, in ordinary books, except when the author can 
reasonably be conceived to be speaking, not merely in his 
own person, but as the organ of a body, or when he can 
fairly assume that his readers are going along with him, his 
using the plural we impresses one with much such a feeling 
as a man’s being afraid to look one in the face. Yet I have 
known of a work, a history of great merit, which was sent 
back to its author with a request that he would weed the 
Ies out of it, by a person of high eminence ; who however 
rose to eminence in the first instance as a reviewer, and the 
eccentricities in whose character and conduct may perhaps 
be best solved by looking upon him as a reviewer trans¬ 
formed into a politician. For a reviewer’s business is to 
have positive opinions upon all subjects, without need of 
stedfast principles or thoroughgoing knowledge upon any; 







GUESSES AT TRUTH. 97 

and he belongs to the hornet class, unproductive of anything 
useful or sweet, but ever ready to sally forth and sting,—to 
the class of which Iago is the head, and who are “ nothing, 
if not critical.” 

So far indeed is the anxiety to suppress the personal 
pronoun from being a sure criterion of humility, that there 
is frequently a ludicrous contrast between the conventional 
generality of our language, and the egotism of the senti¬ 
ments exprest in it. Under this cover a man is withheld by 
no shame from prating about his most trivial caprices, and 
will say, we think so and so, we do so and so, ten times, where 
Montaigne might have hesitated to say I once. Often 
especially in scientific treatises,—which, from the propensity, 
of their authors to look upon words, and to deal with 
them, as bare signs, are not seldom rude and amorphous in 
style,—the plural we is mere clumsiness, a kind of refuge 
for the destitute, a help for those who cannot get quit of 
their subjectivity, or write about objects objectively. This, 
which is the great difficulty in all thought,—the forgetting 
oneself, and passing out of oneself into the object of one’s 
contemplation,—is also one of the main difficulties in com¬ 
position. It requires much more self-oblivion to speak of 
things as they are, than to talk about what we see, and what 
we 'perceive, and what we think, and what we conceive, and • 
what we find, and what we know : and as self-oblivion is in all 
things an indispensable condition of grace, which is infallibly 
marred by selfconsciousness, the exclusion of such references 
to ourselves, except when we are speaking personally or 
problematically, is an essential requisite for classical grace in ! 
style. This, to be sure, is the very last merit which any one 
would look for in Dr Chalmers. He is a great thinker, and 
a great and good man ; and his writings have a number of 
merits, but not this. Still even in him it produces a whim¬ 
sical effect, when, in declaring his having given up the 
opinion he once held on the allsufficiency and exclusiveness 
of the miraculous evidence for Christianity, although he is 
speaking of what is so distinctively personal, he still cannot 
divest himself of the plurality he has been accustomed to 


h 












98 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


assume : see the recent edition of his Works, vol. iii. p. 385. 
Droll however as it sounds, to find a man saying, We formerly 
thought differently, but we have now changed our mind, the 
passage is a fine proof of the candour and ingenuousness 
which characterize its author : and every lover of true phi¬ 
losophy must rejoice at the accession of so illustrious a 
convert from the thaumatolatry by which our theology has 
been debased for more than a century. 

Moreover the plural we, though not seldom used dicta- 
torially, rather diminishes than increases the weight of what 
is said. One is slow to believe that a man is much in 
earnest, when he will not stand out and bear the brunt of 
the public gaze ; when he shrinks from avowing, What I 
have written, I have written. Whereas a certain respect and 
deference is ever felt almost instinctively for the personality 
of another, when it is not impertinently protruded : and it 
is pleasant to be reminded now and then that we are reading 
the words of a man, not the words of a book. Hence the 
interest we feel in the passages where Milton speaks of 
himself. This was one of the things which added to the 
power of Cobbett’s style. His readers knew who was talking 
to them. They knew it was William Cobbett, not the Times, 
or the Morning Chronicle, —that the words proceeded from 
the breast of a man, not merely from the mouth of a 
printing-press. It is only under his own shape, we all feel, 
that we can constrain Proteus to answer us, or rely on 
what he says. 

In a certain sense indeed the authorial we will admit of 
a justification, which is beautifully exprest by Schubert, in 
the Dedication of his History of the Soul. “ It is an old 
custom for writers to dedicate the work of their hands to 
some one reader, though it is designed to serve many.— 
This old custom appears to be of the same origin with that 
for authors, when they are speaking of themselves, or of what 
they have done, not to say I, but we. Both practices would 
seem originally to have been an open avowal of that con¬ 
viction, which forces itself upon us in writing books, more 
strongly than in any other employment,—namely, that the 







GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


99 


individual mind cannot produce anything worthy, except in 
a bond of love and of unity of spirit with another mind, 
associated with it as its helpmate. For this is one of the 
purposes of life and of its labours, that a man should find 
out how little there is in him that he has received in and 
through himself, and how much that he has received from 
others, and that hereby he may learn humility and love.” 

Another common disguise is that of putting on a domino. 
Instead of coming forward in their own persons, many choose 
rather to make their appearance as the Author, the Writer, 
the Reviewer. In prefaces this is so much the fashion, that 
our best and purest writers, Southey for instance, and 
Thirlwall, have complied with it. Nay, even Wordsworth 
has sanctioned this prudish coquetry by his practice in the 
Preface to the Excursion, and in his other later writings in 
prose. In earlier days he shewed no reluctance to speak 
as himself. 

This affectation is well ridiculed by Tieck, in his Drama- 
turgische Blaetter, i. 27 5. “It has struck me for years (he 
says), as strange, that our reviewers have at length allowed 
themselves to be so overawed by the everlasting jests and 
jeers of their numberless witty and witless assailants, as to 
have dropt the plural we; much to their disadvantage, it 
seems to me ; nay, much to the disadvantage of true modesty 
which they profess to be aiming at. In a collective work, to 
which there are many anonymous contributors, each, so long 
as he continues anonymous, speaks in the name of his col- 
legues, as though they agreed with him. The editor too 
must examine and approve of the articles : so that there 
must always be two persons of one mind ; and these may 
fairly call themselves we. Keviewers moreover have often to 
lift up their voices against whatever is new, paradoxical, 
original,—and are compelled on the other hand, whether by 
their own convictions, or by personal considerations, to praise 
what is middling and commonplace. Hence no soverein on 
earth can have a better right to say we, than such a reviewer ; 
who may lie down at night with the calmest conscience, 
under the conviction that he has been speaking as the 








TOO 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


mouthpiece of thousands of his countrymen, when he declared, 
We are quite unable to understand this and that , or, We can by 
no means approve of such a notion. How tame in com¬ 
parison is the newfangled phrase ! The reviewer confesses that 
he cannot understand this. 

“ Still stranger is it to see, how writers in journals, even 
when they sign their names, and thus appear in their own 
persons, have for some time almost universally shunned 
saying 7, just as if they were children, with an unaccount¬ 
able squeamishness, and have twisted and twined about in 
the uncouthest windings, to escape from this short, simple 
sound. Even in independent works one already meets with 
such expressions as The writer of this, or, The writer of these 
lines ,—a longwinded, swollen 7, which is carrying us back to 
a stiff, clumsy, lawpaper style. In journals the phrase is, 
The undersigned has to state, Your correspondent conceives. 
Ere long we shall find in philosophical treatises, The thinker 
of this thought takes the liberty of remarking, or, The discoverer 
of this notion begs leave to say. Nay, if this modesty be such 
a palpable virtue, as it would seem to be from the general 
rage for it, shall we not soon see in descriptive poetry, The 
poet of these lines walkt through the wood ? Even this how¬ 
ever would be far too presumptuous, to call oneself a poet. 
So the next phrase will be, The versifier of this feeble essay 
Walkt, if his memory deceive him not, Across a meadow, where, 
audacious deed ! He pluckt a daisy from its grassy couch : or, 
The youth, whose wish is that he may hereafter Be deemed a 
poet, sauntered toward the grove. There is no end of such 
periphrases; and perhaps the barbarism will spread so widely 
that compositors, whenever they come to an 7 in a manu¬ 
script, will change it into one of these trailing circumlocutions. 
When I look into Lessing and his contemporaries, I find none 
of this absurd affectation. Modesty must dwell within, in 
the heart; and a short 7 is the modestest, most natural, 
simplest word I can use, when I have anything I want to 
say to the reader.” 

There is another mode of getting rid of our 7, which has 
recently become very common, especially in ladies notes, so 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


101 


that I suppose it is inculcated by the Polite Letter-writer; 
though, to be sure, I is such an inflexible, unfeminine word, 
one cannot wonder they should catch at any means of evading 
it. Ask a couple to dinner : Mrs Tomkins will reply, Mr 
Tomkins and myself will be very happy. This indeed is need¬ 
lessly awkward : for she might so easily betake herself to a 
woman’s natural place of shelter, by using we. But one person 
will tell you, Lord A. and myself took a walk this morning ; 
another, Col. B. and myself fought a duel; another, Miss E. 
and myself have been making love to each other. “ Thus by 
myself myself is self-abused.” One might fancy that, it 
having been made a grave charge against Wolsey, that he 
said, The King and /, everybody was haunted by the fear of 
being indicted for a similar misdemeanour. 

In like manner myself is often used, incorrectly, it seems 
to me, instead of the objective pronoun me. Its legitimate 
usage is either as a reciprocal pronoun, or for the sake of dis¬ 
tinction, or of some particular emphasis; as when Juliet cries, 
“ Romeo, doff thy name, And for that name, which is no part of 
thee, Take all myself or as when Adam says to Eve, “ Best 
image of myself ’ and dearer half.” In the opening of the Para¬ 
disiacal hymn,—“ These are thy glorious works, Parent of 
good, Almighty ! Thine this universal frame, Thus wondrous 
fair! Thyself how wondrous then!" —there is an evident 
contrast: If thy works are so wondrous , how wondrous must 
Thou Thyself be ! In like manner when Valentine, in the 
Two Gentlemen of Verona , says of Proteus, “ I knew him as 
myself; And though myself have been an idle truant, 
Omitting the sweet benefit of time, To clothe my age with 
angel-like perfection, Yet hath Sir Proteus—Made use and 
fair advantage of his days ; ”—it amounts to the same thing 
as if he had said, Though I for my part have been an idle 
truant. Where there is no such emphasis, or purpose of 
bringing out a distinction or contrast, the simple pronoun 
is the right one. Inaccuracies of this kind also, though 
occasionally found in writers of former times, have become 
much more frequent of late years. Even Coleridge, when 
speaking about his projected poem on Cain, says, “ The title 








102 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


and subject were suggested by myself .” In such expressions 
as my father and myself my brother and myself, we are misled 
by homceophony : but the old song beginning “ My father, 
my mother, and I,” may teach us what is the idiomatic, and 
also the correct usage. 

On the other hand, me is often substituted vulgarly and 
ungrammatically for I. For the objective me, on which 
others act, is very far from being so formidable a creature, 
either to oneself or to others, as the subjective I, the ground 
of all consciousness, and volition, and action, and respon¬ 
sibility. Grammatically too it seems to us as if I always 
required something to follow it, something to express doing 
or suffering. Hence, when one cries out, Who is there ? three 
people out of four answer Me. Hence too such expressions 
as that in Launce’s speech, where he gets so puzzled about 
his personal identity, after having once admitted the thought 
that he could be anything but himself: “ I am the dog . . . 
no, the dog is himself; and I am the dog . . . oh, the dog is 
me, and I am myself... ay, so, so.” It may be considered 
a token of the want of individuality in the French character, 
that their je is incapable of standing alone ; and that, in such 
phrases as the foregoing, moi would be the only admissible 
word. u. 

This shrinking from the use of the personal pronoun, this 
autophoby, as it may be called, is not indeed a proof of the 
modesty it is designed to indicate ; any more than the hydro¬ 
phobia is a proof that there is no thirst in the constitution. 
On the contrary, it rather betrays a morbidly sensitive self- 
consciousness. It may however be regarded as a mark of the 
decay of individuality of character amongst us, as a symptom 
that, as is mostly the case in an age of high cultivation, we 
are ceasing to be living persons, each animated by one per¬ 
vading, formative principle, ready to follow it whithersoever 
it may lead us, and to stake our lives for it, and that we are 
shriveling up into encyclopedias of opinions. To refer to 
specific evidence of this is needless. Else abundance may be 
found in the want of character, the want of determinate, 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


103 


consistent, stedfast principles, so wofully manifest in those 
who have taken a prominent part in the proceedings of our 
Legislature of late years. There is still one rock indeed, 
stout and bold and unshakable as can be desired : but the 
main part of the people about him have been washt and 
ground down to sand, the form of which a breath of air, a 
child’s caprice, a man’s foot will change. Or what other 
inference can be drawn from the vapid characterlessness of 
our recent poetry and novels of modern life, when compared 
with that rich fund of original, genial, humorous characters, 
which seemed to be the peculiar dower of the English intel¬ 
lect, and which abode with it, amid all the vicissitudes of our 
literature, from the age of Shakspeare, nay, from that of 
Chaucer, down to the days of Swift and Defoe and Fielding 
and Smollett and Goldsmith ? 

Yet by a whimsical incongruity, at the very time when 
strongly markt outlines of character are fading away in 
the haze of a literary and scientific amalgama, every man, 
woman, and child has suddenly started up an individual. 
This again is an example how language is corrupted by a 
silly dread of plain speaking. Our ancestors were men and 
women. The former word too was often used generally, as it 
is still, like the Latin homo , for every human being. Un¬ 
luckily however we have no form answering to the German 
Mensch; and hence, -in seeking for a word which should 
convey no intimation of sex, we have had recourse to a variety 
of substitutes : for, none being strictly appropriate, each 
after a time has been deemed vulgar; and none has been 
lasting. 

In Chaucer’s days wight was the common word in the 
singular, folk in the plural. Neither of these words had any 
tinge of vulgarity then attacht to them. In the Doctor s 
Tale , he says of Virginia, “ Fair was this maid, of excellent 
beautee, Aboven every wight that man may see : ” where we 
also find man used indefinitely, as in German, answering to 
our present one , from the French on, homo. So again soon 
after : “ Of alle treason soverein pestilence Is, when a wight 
betrayeth innocence.” A hundred other examples might be 



104 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


cited. In like manner folk is used perpetually, especially in 
the Parson's Tale: “ Many be the ways that lead folk to 
Christ; ” “ Sins be the ways that lead folk to hell.” When 
Shakspeare wrote, both these words had lost somewhat of 
their dignity. Biron calls Armado “ a most illustrious wight;" 
and the contemptuous application of this term to others is a 
piece of Pistol’s gasconading. The use of it is also a part of 
the irony with which Iago winds up his description of a good 
woman : “ She was a wight ... if ever such wight were . . . 
To suckle fools, and chronicle small beer.” Folk was seldom 
used, except with the addition of a plural s, in such expres¬ 
sions as old folks, good folks, country folks. The word in 
repute then, in the singular, was a body, of which we retain 
traces in the compounds, somebody, nobody, anybody, everybody. 
Bosalind, on recovering from her fainting-fit, says, “ A body 
would think this was well counterfeited; ” where we should 
now say a 'person. Bianca, in the Taming of the Shrew, speaks 
of “ a hasty-witted body." That there was nothing dero¬ 
gatory in the word, is clear from Angelo’s calling himself 
“ so eminent a body." Other words, such as a soul, a creature, 
a fellow, were mostly attended with a by-shade of meaning. 

A number were summed up under the general word people, 
the Latin counterpart of the Saxon folk, which it superseded. 
Of this use we find the germs in our Bible, in the expressions 
much people, all people, all the people. “ 0 wonder ! (cries 
Miranda, when she first sees the shipwreckt party;) How 
many goodly creatures are there here ! How beauteous man¬ 
kind is ! 0 brave new world, That has such people in it! ” 

Bassanio, after opening the casket, compares himself to one 
“ That thinks he hath done well in people's eyes." So too 
Bichard the Second says of himself, “Thus play I in one 
person many people." These passages justify the idiomatic 
use of the word, which, it is to be hoped, will still keep its 
ground, in spite of the ignorant affectation of unidiomatic 
fine writing. 

Next everybody became a person; a word which is not 
inappropriate, when we bethink ourselves of its etymology, 
seeing that so many persons are in truth little else than 









GUESSES AT TRUTII. 


105 


masks, and that every breath of air will sound through 
them : for to the lower orders, who do not wear masks, the 
term is seldom applied. Several causes combined to give this 
word general circulation. It was a French word : it belonged 
to Law Latin, and to that of the Schools : it was adopted 
from the Vulgate by our translators. It was coming into 
common use in Shakspeare’s time. Angelo asks Isabella, 
what she would do, “ Finding herself desired of such a person , 
Whose credit with the judge could save her brother.’’ 
Dogberry says, “ Our watch have comprehended two aus¬ 
picious persons .” Rosalind tells Orlando, that “ Time travels 
in divers paces with divers persons .” 

Nowadays however all these words are grown stale. Such 
grand people are we, for whom the world is too narrow, our 
dignity will not condescend to enter into anything short of a 
quadrisyllable. No ! give us a fine, big, long word, no matter 
what it means : only it must not have been degraded- by 
being applied to any former generation. As a woman now 
deems it an insult to be called anything but a female, —as a 
strumpet is become an unfortunate female, —and as every day 
we may read of sundry females being taken to Bowstreet,— 
in like manner everybody has been metamorphosed into an 
individual, by the Circe who rules the fashionable slang of 
the day. You can hardly look into a newspaper, but you 
find a story how five or six individuals were lost in the snow, 
or were overturned, or were thrown out of a boat, or were 
burnt to death. A minister of state informs the House of 
Commons, that twenty individuals were executed at the last 
assizes. A beggar this morning said to me, that he was an 
unfortunate individual. A man of literary eminence told me 
the other day that an individual was looking at a picture, 
and that this individual was a painter. One even reads, how 
an individual met another individual in the street, and how 
these two individuals quarreled, and how a third individual 
came up to part the two individuals who were fighting, and 
how the two individuals fell upon the third individual, and 
belaboured him for his pains. This is hardly an exaggerated 
parody of an extract I met with a short time back from a 



106 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

speech, which was pronounced to be “ magnificent,” and in 
which the word recurs five times in eighteen lines. Nay, a 
celebrated preacher, it is said, has been so destitute of all 
feeling for decorum in language, as to call our Saviour “ this 
eminent individual .” Alas too ! even Wordsworth, of all our 
writers the most conscientiously scrupulous in the use of 
words, in a note to one of the poems in his last volume, says 
that it was “ never seen by the individual for whom it was 
intended.” So true is the remark, which Coleridge makes, 
when speaking of the purity of Wordsworth’s language, that 
“ in prose it is scarcely possible to preserve our style unal¬ 
loyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere, 
from the sermon to the newspaper.” For, if Landor has done 
so, it is because he has spent so much of his life abroad. 
Hence his knowledge of our permanent language has been 
little troubled by the rubbish which floats on our ephemeral 
language, and from which no man living in England can 
escape. 

When and whence did this strange piece of pompous 
inanity come to us ? and how did it gain such sudden vogue 1 
It sounds very modern indeed, scarcely older than the 
Reform-Bill. Have we caught it from Irish oratory or from 
the Scotch pulpit h both of which have been so busy of late 
years in corrupting our mother English. To the former one 
might ascribe it, from seeing that, of all classes, our Irish 
speakers are the fondest of babbling about individuals. Its 
empty grandiloquence too sounds like a voice from the 
Emerald Isle; while its philosophical pretension would 
bespeak the north of the Tweed. Or is it a Gallicism ? for 
the French too apply their individu to particular persons, 
though never, I believe, thus promiscuously. Its having got 
down already into the mouth of beggars is a curious instance 
of the rapidity with which words circulate in this age of 
steampresses, and steamcoaches, and steamboats, and steam- 
thoughts, and steamconstitutions. 

The attempt to check the progress of a word, which has 
already acquired such currency, may perhaps be idle. Still 
it is well if one can lead some of the less thoughtless to call 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 107 

to mind, that words have a meaning and a history, and that, 
when used according to their historical meaning, they have 
also life and power. The word in question too is a good and 
valuable word, and worth reclaiming for its own appropriate 
signification. We want it; we have frequent occasion for 
it, and have no substitute to fill its place. It should hardly 
be used, except where some distinction or contrast is either 
exprest or implied. A man is an individual , as regarded in 
his special, particular unity, not in his public capacity, not as 
a member of a body : he is an individual , so far as he is an 
integral whole, different and distinct from other men: and 
that which makes him what he is, that in which he differs and 
is distinguish from other men, is his individuality , and indi¬ 
viduates or individualizes him. Thus, in the Dedication of the 
Advancement of Learning , Bacon says to the King : “ I 
thought it more respective to make choice of some oblation, 
which might rather refer to the propriety and excellency of 
your individual person, than to the business of your crown 
and state.” Milton indeed uses individual for undivided or 
indivisible; as for instance in that grand passage of his Ode 
on Time, where he says that, when Time is at an end, “ Then 
long Eternity shall greet our bliss With an individual kiss.” 
And this usage is common in our early writers. Ralegh, in 
the Preface to his History (p. 17), speaks of the notion of Pro- 
clus, “ that the compounded essence of the world is continued 
and knit to the Divine Being by an individual and inseparable 
power.” To our ears however this sounds like a Latinism. 
Indeed this is the only sense in which the Romans used the 
word. 

The sense it bears with us, it acquired among the School¬ 
men, from whom we derive so large a portion of our philoso¬ 
phical vocabulary; as may be seen, for instance, in the 
following passage of Anselm’s Monologium (c. xxvii.): “Cum 
omnis substantia tractetur, aut esse universalis, quae pluribus 
substantiis essentialiter communis est,—ut, hominem esse, 
commune est singulis hominibus; aut est individua, quae 
universalem essentiam communem habet cum aliis,—quem- 
admodum singuli homines commune habent cum singulis, 



108 (HJESSES AT TRUTH. 

ut homines sint.” Thus Donne, in his 38th Sermon (vol. ii. 
p. 172), speaking of Christ, says : “This is that mysterious 
Person, who is singularis , and yet not individuus; singularis, 
—there never was, never shall be any such;—but we cannot 
call him individual , as every other particular man is, because 
Christitatis non est genus , there is no genus or species of 
Christs : it is not a name which can be communicated to any 
other, as the name of man may to every individual man.” 
Again Bacon, in the first Chapter of the second Book De 
Augmentis Sdentiarum, writes: “ Historia proprie indivi- 
duorum est.—Etsi enim Historia Naturalis circa species 
versari videatur, tamen hoc fit ob promiscuam rerum natu- 
ralium similitudinem; ut, si unam noris, omnes noris. 
—Poesis etiam individuorum est.—Philosophia individua 
dimittit, neque impressiones primas individuorum, sed 
notiones ab illis abstractas complectitur.” 

This usage might be illustrated by a number of passages 
from our metaphysical writers; as where Locke says (iii. 3, 4), 
that men “ in their own species,—wherein they have often 
occasion to mention particular persons, make use of proper 
names ; and there distinct individuals have distinct denomi¬ 
nations.” This example shews how easily the modem abuse 
might grow up. In the following sentence from the Wealth 
of Nations, (B. v. c. 1),—“ In some cases the state of society 
places the greater part of individuals in such situations as 
naturally form in them almost all the abilities and virtues 
which that state requires,”—there is still an intimation of 
the antithesis properly implied in the word. But in many 
passages of Dugald Stewart, who uses it perpetually in the 
first volume of his Philosophy of the Human Mind , publisht 
in 1792, the antithesis is scarcely discernible; as, for 
instance, when he says (p. 20), “ There are few individuals , 
whose education has been conducted in every respect with 
attention and judgement.” Here a more idiomatic writer 
would have said, There are few persons. 

By the way, a good glossary to the Schoolmen would be an 
interesting and instructive work ; a glossary collecting all the 
words which they coined, pointing out the changes they 



GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


109 


made in the signification of old Latin words, explaining the 
grounds of these innovations, and the wants they were meant 
to supply, and tracking these words through the various 
languages of modem Europe. Valuable as Ducange’s great 
work is for political, legal, ecclesiastical, military, and all 
manner of technical words, we still want a similar, though a 
far less bulky and laborious collection of such words as his 
plan did not embrace, especially of philosophical, scientific, 
and medical words, before we can be thoroughly acquainted 
with the alterations which Latin underwent, when, from 
being the language of Rome, it became that of all persons of 
education throughout Europe. Even from Ducange it would 
be well if some industrious grammarian would pick out all 
such words as have left any offspring amongst us. Then 
alone shall we be prepared for understanding the history of 
the English language, when its various elements have been 
carefully separated, collected, arranged, and classified. u. 

The offense charged against Wolsey is usually conceived to 
have lain in his having prefixt his name to the King’s; as 
though, when he wrote Ego et Rex mens , it had been tanta¬ 
mount to saying I and the King ; an expression so repugnant 
to our English notions of good-breeding, that it seems to us 
to imply the most overweening assumption of superiority. 
Hence, when the lords are taunting him in Shakspeare, 
Norfolk says, “ Then that in all you writ to Rome, or else To 
forein princes, Ego et Rex mens Was still inscribed, in which 
you brought the King To be your servant .” Thus the article 
of the Bill against him is stated by Holinshed, from whom 
Shakspeare’s words are copied : “ Item, in all writings which 
he wrote to Rome, or any other forein prince, he wrote Ego 
et Rex meus, I and my King , as who would say that the King 
were his servant.” The charge is given in similar words by 
Grafton, by Hall, and by Foxe. Addison too understood it 
in the same sense. In his paper on Egotism (,Spectator , 562), 
he says, “ The most violent egotism which I have met with 
in the course of my reading, is that of Cardinal Wolsey, Ego 
et Rex meus, I and my KingT 








110 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


From this one might suppose that the grievance would 
have been removed, had he written Rex meus et ego , violating 
the Latin idiom ; which in such expressions follows the 
natural order of our thoughts, and, inasmuch as a man’s own 
feelings and actions must usually be foremost in his mind, 
makes him place himself first, when he has to speak of him¬ 
self along with another. Hence Wolsey’s last biographer, in 
the Cabinet Cyclopedia , talks of “ the Ego et Rex meus charge, 
which only betrays its framer’s ignorance of the Latin idiom.” 
Yet, when one finds that the first name subscribed to the 
Bill against Wolsey is that of Thomas More, a modest man 
will be slow to believe that it can have been drawn up with 
such gross ignorance. Nor was it. A transcript of the Bill 
from the Records is given by Lord Herbert in his Life of 
Henry the Eighth , and has lately been reprinted in the State- 
Trials : and there the fourth article stands as follows. “ Also 
the said Lord Cardinal, of his presumptuous mind, in divers 
and many of his letters and instructions sent out of this 
realm to outward parties, had joined himself with your 
Grace, as in saying and writing in his said letters and instruc¬ 
tions, The King and I would ye should do thus;—The King 
and I give you our hearty thanks : whereby it is apparent that 
he used himself more like a fellow to your Highness, than 
like a subject.” So that the blunder is imaginary. The 
charge was, not that he placed himself above and before the 
King, but that he spoke of himself along and on a level with 
the King, in a manner ill befitting a subject and a servant. 
The inaccuracy in Foxe’s report was noted long ago by 
Collier in his Ecclesiastical History. 

“ It is always a mistake (says Niebuhr) to attribute ignor¬ 
ance on subjects of general notoriety to eminent men, in 
order to account for what we may find in them running 
counter to current opinions.” This, and Coleridge’s golden 
rule,—“ Until you understand an author’s ignorance, pre¬ 
sume yourself ignorant of his understanding,”—should be 
borne in mind by all writers who feel an itching in their 
forefinger and thumb to be carping at their wisers and 
betters. u. 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. Ill 

The substitution of plurality for unity, and the unwilling¬ 
ness to use the simple personal pronoun, are not confined to 
that of the first person. In the languages of modern 
Europe this and divers other expedients have been adopted 
to supersede the pronoun of the second person : and only 
among certain classes, or in particular cases, is it thought 
allowable nowadays to address any one by his rightful 
appellation, thou. This is commonly supposed to be dictated 
by a desire of shewing honour to him whom we are 
addressing; as may be seen, for instance, in Luther’s remark 
on the use of the plural in the first words of the Book of 
Genesis : “ Explodenda igitur est Judaeorum frigida cavillatio, 
quod reverentiae causa plurali numero sit usus.—Praesertim 
cum id non sit omnibus linguis commune, quod nobis 
Germanis usitatum est, ut reverentia sit plurali numero uti, 
cum de uno aliquo loquimur.” But the further question 
arises : why is it esteemed a mark of honour to turn an 
individual into a multitude? Surely we do not mean to 
intimate that he must multiply himself like Kehama, in 
order to storm our hearts by bringing a fresh self against 
every entrance. Might not one rather expect that the 
mark of honour would be to separate him from all other 
men, and to regard him exclusively as himself, and by 
himself? as Cressida’s servant tells her, that Ajax is “ a very 
man per se, And stands alone.” The secret motive, which 
lies at the bottom of these conventions, I believe to be a 
reluctance, in the one case to obtrude one’s own personality, 
in the other to intrude on the personality of another. In 
both there is the feeling of conscious sinfulness, leading us 
to hide among the trees. 

In the Greeks and Romans, as there was not the same 
consciousness of a sinful nature, neither was there the same 
shrinking from personality in their addresses to each other. 
We see this in many features of their literature, especially 
of their oratory; which modern critics, judging them per¬ 
versely, according to the feelings and notions of later times, 
pronounce to be in bad taste. For with us a personality 
means an insult, and such as no gentleman will be guilty of. 



112 


GUESSES AT TKUTH. 


But the ancients felt differently on this matter: nor did 
they ever fancy there could be anything indecorous or 
affronting in calling each other simply av or tu. This is of a 
piece with their unscrupulousness about the exhibition of 
the naked form. Regarding human nature as one, they 
were little sensible of the propriety of concealing any part of 
it. If they did so, in conformity to the custom of wearing 
clothing, in the statues of real personages, whom they wisht 
to represent as their countrymen had been wont to see them, 
they proved that this did not arise from any moral delicacy, 
inasmuch as nakedness was deemed appropriate to the statues 
of most of the gods. Whereas in modern times the feeling 
of the duplicity of our nature has been so strong, and it has 
been so much the custom to look upon the body as the main 
root and source of evil, that our aim has been to hide every 
part of it, except the face as the index, and the hand as the 
instrument of the mind. So too are we studious to conceal 
every action of our animal nature, even those, such as tears 
and the other outward signs of grief, in which the animal 
nature is acting under the sway of the spiritual. To us the 
tears of Achilles, the groans of Philoctetes, the yells of 
Hercules, seem, not merely unheroic, but unmanly. Nay, 
even a woman would be withheld by shame from making 
such a display of her weakness. 

In like manner it strikes our minds as such insolent 
familiarity for a man to thou his superiors, that most people, 
I imagine, would suppose that under the Roman Empire at 
all events it can never have been allowable to address an 
emperor with a bare tu. If any one needs to be convinced 
of the contrary, he has only to look into Pliny’s letters 
to Trajan, or Fronto’s to Antoninus Pius and Marcus 
Aurelius : he will find that no more ceremony was observed 
in writing to the master of the world, than if he had been a 
common Roman citizen. Many striking speeches too, 
shewing this, are recorded. For instance, that of Asinius 
Gallus to Tiberius : Interrogo , Caesar , quam partem 
reipublicae mandari tibi velis ? That of Haterius : Quousque 
patieris Caesar non adesse caput reipublicae ? That of Piso, 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


113 


which Tacitus calls vestigium morientis libertatis : Quo loco 
censebis, Caesar ? Si primus , habebo quod sequar: si post omnes, 
vereor ne imprudens dissentiam. That of Subrius Flavus/when ! 
askt by Nero, why he had conspired against him : Oderam 
te : odisse coepi, postquam parricida matris et uxoris et auriga 
et histrio et incendiarius exstitisti. The same thing is proved 
by the extraordinary, tumultuous address of the Senate to 
Pertinax on the death of Commodus : Parricida trahatur. 
Pogamus, Auguste: parricida trahatur. Exaudi Caesar. 
Delatores ad leonem. Exaudi Caesar. Delatores ad leonem. 
JExaudi Caesar. Gladiatorem in spoliario. Exaudi Caesar. 

From a couple of passages in the Augustan History indeed, 
one might imagine that Diocletian’s love of pomp and 
ceremony had shewn itself in exacting the plural from those 
who addrest him. The authors of the several Lives have 
not been satisfactorily ascertained : but in that of Marcus 
Aurelius the writer says : Deus usque etiam nunc habetur , ut 
vobis ipsis, sacratissime imperator Diocletiane , et semper visum 
est et videtur: qui eum inter numina vestra , non ut caeteros , 
sed specialiter veneramini, ac saepe dicitis, vos vita et dementia 
tales esse cupere , qualis fuit Marcus. At the end of the Life 
of Lucius Verus, which no doubt is by the same writer, after 
denying the report that Marcus Aurelius had poisoned I 
Verus, he adds : Post Marcum , praeter vestram clementiam, j 
Diocletiane Auguste , imperatorem talem nec adulatio videatur j 
posse conjingere. How these two passages are to be accounted ! 
for, I know not. They are too personal to allow of our 
supposing that Maximian was comprehended in them. Was 
it an Oriental fashion, which Diocletian tried to introduce, 
along with the Persian diadem and silk robes and tissue of 
gold, and which was dropt from its repugnance to the genius 
of the Latin language In the other addresses the ordinary 
style is the singular; as may be seen in those to Diocletian, 
in the lives of Elius Verus, of Heliogabalus, and of Macrinus ; 
and in those to Constantine, in the Lives of Geta, of 
Alexander Severus, of the Maximins, of the Gordians, and of 
Claudius. 

Such too, so far as my observation has extended, was the i 


i 













114 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


style under the Byzantine Empire. In their rescripts 
indeed, and other ordinances, the Roman emperors spoke in 
the plural number, as may be seen in every other page of 
Justinian’s Codex. For the use of the plural nos was 
already common among the Romans, at least among the 
aristocracy, in their best ages; the bent of their spirit 
leading them to merge their own individual, more than any 
other people has ever done, in their social character, as 
members whether of their family, or of their order, or of the 
Roman nation. In this too they shewed that they were 
a nation of kings. For a soverein’s duty is to forget his own 
personality, and to regard himself as the impersonation of 
the State. He should exactly reverse Louis the Fourteenth’s 
hateful and fearful speech : La France cest moi. Instead of 
swallowing up his country in his voracious maw, he should 
identify himself with it, and feel that his whole being is 
wrapt up in his people, and that apart from them he is 
nothing, r no more than a head when severed from its body. 
As Hegel says, in his Philosophy of Law (§ 279), when 
explaining the difficulty attendant on a monarchal constitu¬ 
tion, that the will of the State is to be embodied in an 
individual : “ This does not mean that the monarch may 
act arbitrarily. On the contrary he is bound to the concrete 
substance of the measures proposed to him, and, if the 
constitution is firmly establisht, will often have little more 
to do than to sign his name. But this name is of import¬ 
ance : it is the apex, beyond which we cannot pass. One 
might say, that an organic constitution had existed in the 
noble democracy of Athens. But we see at the same time 
that the Greeks were wont to draw their ultimate decisions 
from things wholly external, from oracles, the entrails of 
victims, the flight of birds, and that they regarded Nature 
as a power which declares and pronounces what is good for 
man. Self-consciousness had not yet attained to the 
abstraction of pure subjectivity, to the condition in which 
the decisive I will is to be uttered by man. This I will 
forms the great distinction between the ancient and the 
modern world, and must therefore have its peculiar expres- 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 115 

sion in the great edifice of the State.—The objections which 
have been urged against monarchy,—that through the 
soverein the condition of the State becomes subject to 
chance, since he may be ill educated, or altogether unworthy 
of standing ,at the head of it, and that it is absurd for this 
to be the reasonable idea of a State,—are groundless, from 
being based on the assumption that the peculiarities of 
individual character are the material point. In a perfectly 
organized constitution we merely need the apex of a formal 
decision; and the only thing indispensable in a soverein is 
a person who can say Yes , and put the dot on the /. For 
the apex should be such that the peculiarities of character 
shall be of no moment.—In a well regulated monarchy the 
legislature determines the objective measures, to which the 
monarch has merely to affix the subjective I will” Hence 
nos, nous, wir, we, is the fitting style for princes in their 
public capacity; as it is for all who are speaking and acting, 
not in their own persons, but as officers of the State. For 
them to say, I order so and so, might seem almost as 
impertinent, as for a servant to say, I am to have a party at 
dinner tomorrow. In these days our household ties are so 
loosened, that most servants would say, My Master is to 
have a party tomorrow, or perhaps, entirely disguising the 
relation between them, would call him Mr. A. In simpler 
times, when there was more dutiful affection and loyalty, 
they would have said we, like Caleb Balderstone. The use of 
nos however by the Roman emperors did not involve that of 
vos in addresses to them ; any more than our calling every¬ 
body you implies that they call themselves we. 

It would require a long and laborious examination, with 
the command of a well-stockt public library, to make out 
when and how and by what steps the use of the plural 
pronoun in speaking to another became prevalent in the 
various languages of modern Europe. Grammarians have 
hardly turned their attention to this point. The difficulty 
of such an enquiry is the greater, because the language of 
books in this respect has by no means fallen in with that of 
ordinary life. Poetry especially, as its aim is to lift men 



116 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

above the artificial conventions of society, has retained the 
natural, simple pronoun much more extensively than 
common speech. Hence the use of thou in poetry does not 
prove that it would have been used under the same circum¬ 
stances in conversation ; though the use of the plural 
pronoun justifies our inferring that it was already current, 
and probably much widelier spread. In Boccaccio’s Novels, 
where one might expect to find a closer reflexion of common 
life, the singular pronoun appears to be used constantly. 
From his letters however it would seem to have been already 
superseded in most cases by the plural in the intercourse of 
society ; though Ranke, in his Histories of Romanesque and 
Germanic Nations (p. 105), says of the Florentines at the end 
of the fifteenth century, that “ they all called each other 
thou, and only used you or messere in speaking to a knight, a 
doctor, or to an uncle.” Petrarch, whose reverent love leads 
him to address Laura by the plural pronoun, uses the 
singular in sonnets written to his friends, and uniformly in 
his letters. Indeed the Roman tu seems to have been 
| general in Latin epistles, except those to soverein princes, at 
least since the Revival of Learning : for in earlier times it 
I had been common to use vos. We find tu constantly in 
Luther’s letters, even in those to the Pope, in Melanchthon’s, 
in Milton’s private ones. In those written for Cromwell, 
soverein princes are called vos; and so is Mazarin. The 
prince of Tarentum, Mendez de Haro, and the Conde Mirano 
are tu. In the Prove^al of the Troubadours, Raynouard 
observes, vos is almost always used in speaking to a single 
I person. In the Fabliaux we find" distinctions answering to 
| those which have prevailed almost ever since in French : tu 
is used to indicate familiarity; vous, respect. Parents say 
tu to their children, husbands to their wives : the children 
and wives use the more respectful vous. The same sort of 
distinction seems to prevail in the Niebelungen Lay; in 
which, as in the Homeric poems, the representation of 
manners probably agreed very nearly with what was actually 
found in the world. In the conversation between Chriem- 
hild and her mother, and in that between Siegfried and his 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 117 

parents, the parents use du, the son and daughter ir. The 
princes and knights sometimes take one form, sometimes 
the other, the singular apparently where there is more 
intimacy, or more passion. Husbands and wives use both 
forms indiscriminately. Pfizer, in his Life of Luther (p. 22), 
remarks that, when Luther’s father heard of his son’s 
having become a monk, he wrote a severe rebuke to him, 
calling him Du, having previously used the more respectful 
plural Ihr, since he had taken his master’s degree. Is the 
general prevalence of the plural in modern Europe derived 
from the Teutonic languages % Or did it arise from the same 
cause in them and the Romanesque together ? 

In England the peculiarity has been the entire exclusion 
of thou from the language of the great body of the people. 
Now and then indeed one sees it in those loveletters which 
are unlucky enough to find their way into a court of justice : 
but it is not appropriated, as in France, Italy, and Germany, 
for the expression of familiarity. We enter into no bond 
to thou one another, as our neighbours do to tutoyer, and to 
dutzen. This may be a mark of our characteristic reserve 
and shrinking from every demonstration of feeling. But 
when was this sentence of banishment against thou issued ? 
In Robert of Gloucester, and our other old verse chroniclers, 
it seems to be the constant word, being used even by Cordelia 
in her reply to her father. So is it in Peirs Plouhman; 
the nature of which work however leads us to look for a close 
adherence to the language of the Bible : and I doubt whether 
even Mr Belsham can have gone so far in modernizing the 
w T ords of the Scriptures, as to substitute you for thou. That 
no conclusion can be drawn from Peirs Plouhman with 
regard to the usage, at least of the higher classes in his time, 
is clear from Chaucer; in whom you, except in passages of 
familiarity or elevation, is the customary pronoun. From 
Gower too one may infer that thou was then deemed appro¬ 
priate to the language of familiarity, you to that of respect. 
The Confessor regularly uses thou to the Lover; the Lover 
you or ye to the Confessor. Shakspeare’s practice would 
seem to imply that a distinction, like that which prevailed 










118 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


on the Continent, was also recognised in England. Prospero 
for instance, except in two places, constantly says thou 
to Miranda ; while she always replies with you. The 
same thing is observable in most of Lear’s speeches to his 
daughters, and in Volumnia’s more affectionate ones to 
Coriolanus. When she puts on the reserve of offended 
dignity, she says you. Yet I have not noticed any instance 
of thou in Ellises Collection of Letters; though some of them 
go back as far as the reign of Henry the Fifth : but in few 
of them could one expect it. From Roper’s beautiful Life 
of Sir Thomas More however we perceive, that fathers in 
his days would occasionally, though not uniformly, thou their 
children. “ Lo, dost thou, not see, Megg, (he said to his 
daughter, when looking out of his prison-window, while 
Reynolds and three other monks were led to execution,) that 
these blessed fathers be now as cheerfully going to their 
deaths, as bridegrooms to their marriage ? Wherefore there¬ 
by mayest thou see, mine own good daughter, what a great 
difference there is between such as have in effect spent all 
their days in a strait, hard, penitential, and painful life, 
religiously, and such as have in the world, like worldly 
wretches, as thy poor father hath done, consumed all their 
time in pleasure and ease licentiously. For God, considering 
their long-continued life in most sore and grievous penance, 
will no longer suffer them to remain here in this vale of 
misery and iniquity, but speedily hence taketh them to the 
fruition of his everlasting Deity. Whereas thy silly father, 
Megg, that, like a most wicked caitiff, hath past forth the 
whole course of his miserable life most sinfully, God, thinking 
him not worthy so soon to come to that eternal felicity, j 
leaveth him here yet still in the world further to be plagued 
and turmoiled with misery.” The same thing may be seen j 
in the Earl of Northumberland’s speech to his son, in 
Cavendishes Life of Wolsey, when he is warning him against 
displeasing the king by making love to Anne Boleyn. Wolsey j 
too, in whose service Lord Percy was, talks to him in the 
same paternal style. From Charles the First’s last words to 
the Duke of Gloucester, we perceive that this practice even 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 119 

then was not obsolete, at least in speaking to young children. 
“ Sweetheart, now they will cut off thy father’s head. Mark, 
child, what I say : they will cut off my head, and perhaps 
make thee a king. But mark what I say : you must not be 
a king so long as your brother Charles and James do live. 
For they will cut off your brothers heads, (when they can 
catch them,) and cut off thy head too at last; and therefore, 
I charge you, do not be made a king by them.” In Lord 
Capel’s letter to his wife, written on the day on which he 
was beheaded, in 1649, he uses thou throughout. “My 
eternal life is in Christ Jesus : my worldly considerations in 
the highest degree thou hast deserved. Let me live long 
here in thy dear memory. I beseech thee , take care of thy 
health : sorrow not, afflict not thyself too much. God will 
be to thee better than a husband, and to my children better 
than a father.” 

There was another usage of thou, which prevailed for some 
centuries, namely, in speaking to inferiors. When you came 
into use among the higher classes, the lower were still 
addrest with thou. Living in closer communion with Nature, 
with her simple, permanent forms and ever-recurring opera¬ 
tions, they are in great measure exempted from the capricious 
sway of Fashion, which tosses about the upper twigs and leaves 
of society, but seldom shakes the trunk. Or at least they 
were so till lately: for the enormous increase of traffic of 
every kind, and the ceaseless inroads of the press, which is 
sending its emissaries into every cottage, are rapidly changing 
their character. Yet still one regards and treats them much 
more as children of Nature : and a judicious man would as 
soon think of feeding them with kickshaws and ragoos, as of 
talking to them in any but the plainest, homeliest words. 
What a broad distinction was made with regard to the 
personal pronoun, may be seen in the interesting account of 
William Thorpe’s examination on a charge of heresy before 
the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1407 ; where the archbishop 
and his clerks uniformly thou him, not insultingly, but as a 
matter of course ; while he always uses you in his answers. 
The same distinction is apparent in the dialogues between 



120 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

Othello and Iago. Thus it has happened that we find thou 
in many of the noblest speeches on record, the last words of 
great and good men to the executioner on the scaffold : and 
in legal murders of the great and good, notwithstanding the 
boasted excellence of our laws and courts of justice, the 
history of England is richer than that of any other country. 
It does one good to read such words : so I will quote a few 
examples. For instance, those of Sir Thomas More : Pluck 
up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office; my 
neck is very short; take heed therefore, thou strike not awry, 
for saving of thine honesty. Those of Fisher, the pious Bishop 
of Rochester, when the executioner knelt down to him and 
besought his forgiveness; I forgive thee with all my heart; 
and I trust thou shalt see me overcome this storm lustily. 
Those of the Duke of Suffolk on the same occasion : God 
forgive thee ! and I do ; and when thou dost thine office, I 
pray thee do it well, and bring me out of this world quickly; 
and God have mercy on thee! When Raleigh was led to the 
scaffold, a bald-headed old man prest through the crowd, 
and prayed that God would support him. I thank thee, my 
good friend, said Raleigh to him, and am sorry I am in no 
case to return thee anything for thy good will. But here 
(observing his bald head), take this nightcap; thou hast 
more need of it now than I. Shortly after, he bade the 
executioner shew him the axe : I prithee let me see it. Dost 
thou think I am afraid of it ? And after he had laid his 
head on the block, the blow being delayed, he lifted himself 
up and said : What dost thou fear ? strike, man. In Lady 
Jane Grey’s words indeed, as they are given by Foxe, we 
find you: Pray you, dispatch me quickly. Will you take it off 
before I lie down ? Perhaps it may have seemed to her 
gentle spirit that thou was somewhat unfeminine : though it 
was the word used by mistresses in speaking to their 
servants, as we may perceive from the scenes between Olivia 
and Malvolio, and from those between Julia and Lucetta 
in the Two Gentlemen of Verona; where Julia, when she is 
offended with her maid, passes from the familiar thou to the 
more distant you. 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


121 


It might be imagined that the adoption of the simple 
pronoun in these speeches was occasioned by the solemnity 
of the moment, impelling the parting spirit to cast off the 
artificial, conventional drapery of society. But,—not to 
mention that this itself would have been idle affectation, to 
have taken thought at such a moment about using a word 
at variance with the language of ordinary life,—in speeches, 
made at the same time to persons of their own rank we find 
the same men saying you : and other anecdotes in the bio¬ 
graphies of the sixteenth century shew that thou was in 
common use then in speaking to the lower orders, and even 
to inferiors, who were above them. When Bernard Gilpin 
begged Bishop Tonstal to allow that he would resign either 
his rectory or archdeaconry, that excellent bishop replied, 
Have I not told thee beforehand , that thou wilt be a beggar ? 
I found them combined ; and combined I will leave them. And 
among Gilpin’s numberless acts of benevolence, it is related 
that, in one of his rides, seeing a man much cast down by 
the loss of a horse that had just fallen dead, he told the man 
he should have the one on which his servant was mounted. 
Ah master , said the countryman, my pocket will not reach 
such a beast as that. Come , come! answered Gilpin; take 
him; take him; and when I demand my money , then thou 
shalt pay me. If so many examples of this usage are from 
dying words, it is because such words have been more care¬ 
fully recorded, as precious and sacred memorials. 

This use of a different pronoun in speaking to the lower 
orders was in some measure analogous to that of er, which 
still prevails, and was more general a few years since, in 
Germany; where it was long thought unbecoming for a 
gentleman to hold any direct personal communication with a 
boor, or to speak to him otherwise than as if he were a third 
person. We on the other hand consider it illbred to use he 
or she in speaking of any one present. 

Hence, as the use of er to a gentleman in Germany is 
deemed a gross offense, which is often to be expiated with 
blood, so was the use of thou in England. This was one of 
the disgraceful insults to which Coke had recourse, when 












122 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


argument and evidence failed him, at Raleigh’s trial. All 
that Lord Gobham did, he cried, was at thy instigation, thou 
viper: for I thou thee, thou traitor. And again, when he had 
been completely baffled, he exclaimed: Thou art the most 
vile and execrable traitor that ever lived. I want words suffi¬ 
cient to express thy viperous treasons. When Sir Toby Belch 
is urging Sir Andrew Aguecheek to send a challenge to 
Viola, he says, If thou thoust him some thrice it shall not be 
amiss; in which words the commentators have needlessly 
sought an allusion to Raleigh’s trial. There is not a syllable 
in the context to point the allusion, or to remind the hearer 
either of Raleigh or of Coke. They merely shew, as Coke’s 
behaviour also shews, that to thou a man was a grievous 
insult : and that it was so, George Fox and his followers 
some time after found to their great cost. 

This is well known to be still the shibboleth of Quakerism, 
the only one probably among the Founder’s tenets which has 
always been held inviolate and inviolable by every member 
of the sect. For all sects cling the longest to that which 
is outward and formal in their peculiar creed, and are often 
the more tenacious of it, the more their original spirit has 
evaporated; among other reasons, because by so doing alone 
can they preserve their sectarian existence. In George Fox 
himself the determination to thou all men was not a piece of 
capricious trifling. It flowed from the principle which per¬ 
vaded his whole conduct, the desire of piercing through the 
husk and coating of forms in which men’s hearts and souls 
were wrapt up, and of dragging them out from their lurking- 
places into the open light of day ; although, as extremes are 
ever begetting one another, it has come to pass that no sect 
is so enslaved, so bound hand and foot by forms, as they who 
started by crying out against and casting away all forms. 
Thus Nature ever avenges herself, and reestablishes the 
balance, which man had overweeningly disturbed. 

It was at the very beginning of his preaching, that he, 
who set out on the glorious enterprise of converting all men 
into friends, tells us in his Journal : “ When the Lord sent 
me forth into the world, I was required to Thee and Thou all 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


123 


men and women, without any respect to rich or poor, great 
or small. But oh ! the rage that then was in the priests, 
magistrates, professors, and people of all sorts, but especially 
in priests and professors. For though thou to a single person 
was according to their own learning, their accidence and 
grammar rules, and according to the Bible, yet they could 
not bear to hear it.” This was in 1648 : but his practice 
continued to give offense for many years after. In 1661, he 
says, “ the book called the Battledoor came forth written to 
shew that in all languages thou and thee is the proper and 
usual form of speech to a single person, and you to more 
than one. This was set forth in examples taken out of the 
Scriptures, and out of books of teaching in about thirty 
languages. When the book was finisht, some of them were 
presented to the King and his Council, to the Bishops of 
Canterbury and London (Juxon and Sheldon), and to the 
two Universities one apiece. The King said, it was the 
proper language of all nations: and the Bishop of Canter¬ 
bury, being askt what he thought of it, was so at a stand 
that he could not tell what to say. For it did so inform and 
convince people, that few afterward were so rugged toward 
us for saying thou and thee to a single person, which before 
they were exceeding fierce against us for. For this thou and 
thee was a sore cut to proud flesh, and them that sought 
self-honour; who, though they would say it to God and 
Christ, would not endure to have it said to themselves. So 
that we were often beaten and abused, and sometimes in 
danger of our lives, for using those words to some proud 
men, who would say, What, you illbred clown, do you thou 
me 1 as though there lay breeding in saying you to one, which 
is contrary to all their grammars.” 

In all this there is no slight admixture of ignorance and of 
presumption; as is mostly the case with the vehement 
opposers and defiers of customs not plainly and radically 
immoral. Of the ignorance one should have no right to 
complain, were it not for the presumption which thrusts it 
forward. But the whole proceeding, as Henry More rightly 
urges in his letter to Penn,—who had employed a chapter of 















124 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

his No Cross, No Crown, in an ingenious and elaborate vin¬ 
dication of the usage of his sect,—is inconsistent “ with 
that generosity and freedom and charity and kind compla¬ 
cency, that, one would think, did naturally accompany a 
truly Christian spirit. The great and royal law, which is to 
measure all our Christian actions, is, Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul, and thy neighbour 
as thyself. And one point of our love to our neighbour is 
not to give him offense ; but to comply with him in things 
of an indifferent nature, as all things are that are not of 
their own nature evil,—unless some Divine law, or the law 
of our superiors has bound us. But no law, neither Divine 
or human, has bound us, but that we may say you, when the 
Quakers say thou, to a single person. Nay, Custom, which 
is another Nature, and another Law, and from whence words 
derive their signification, has not only made you to signify 
as well singularly as plurally,—but has superadded a sig¬ 
nification of a moderate respect used in the singular sense; 
as it has added to thou, of the highest respect and reverence 
(for no man will You God, but use the pronoun Thou to 
Him), or else of the greatest familiarity or contempt. So 
that the proper use of you and thou is settled by a long and 
| universal custom.” 

By these absurdities, simple, honest George Fox sadly 
maimed his own strength, and lessened the good he might 
j else have effected. So far indeed he was right, that in a 
regenerate world the bars and bolts, which sever and estrange 
| man from man, would burst, like the doors of St. Paul’s 
j prison at Philippi, and that every man’s bands would be 
loost. Something of the kind may be seen even now in the 
openhearted confidence and affection, which prevail almost at 
sight among such as find themselves united to each other by 
the love of a common Saviour,—a confidence and affection 
! foreshowing the blessed Communion of Saints. But this is 
likelier to be retarded than promoted by efforts to change 
the outward form, so long as the spirit is unchanged. The 
very habit of using words which belong to a higher state of 
feeling than we ourselves have attained to, deadens the sense 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


125 


of truth, and causes a dismal rent in the soul. I am 
speaking only of such things as are not contrary to good 
manners. Whatever is must be quelled, before the inward 
change can be wrought. But that which is indifferent, or 
solely valuable as the expression of some inward state of 
feeling, should be left to spring spontaneously from the 
source, without which it is worthless. 

How must Charles the Second have laught in his sleeve, 
when he acknowledged that thou and thee “ was the proper 
language of all nations ! ” Perhaps it was out of hostility 
to Quakerism and Puritanism, of which thou was deemed 
the watchword, that it fell so entirely into disuse, as it seems 
to have done among all ranks in the latter half of the seven¬ 
teenth century. Locke indeed uses it in his Prefatory 
Addresses to the Reader. In sermons, when the preacher is 
appealing to his hearers severally and personally, it is often 
introduced with much solemnity; as, for instance, in the 
following grand passage of Donne ( Sermon n. p. 27). “ As 

the sun does not set to any nation, but withdraw itself, and 
return again, God, in the exercise of His mercy, does not set 
to thy soul, though he benight it with an affliction.—The 
blessed Virgin was overshadowed ; but it was with the Holy 
Ghost that overshadowed her: thine understanding, thy 
conscience may be so too ; and yet it may be the work of 
the Holy Ghost, who moves in thy darkness, and will bring 
light even out of that, knowledge out of thine ignorance, 
clearness out of thy scruples, and consolation out of thy 
dejection of spirit. God is thy portion, says David. David 
does not speak so narrowly, so penuriously, as to say, God 
hath given thee thy portion, and thou must look for no more : 
but, God is thy portion ; and, as long as He is God, He hath 
more to give ; and, as long as thou art His, thou hast more 
to receive. Thou canst not have so good a title to a subse¬ 
quent blessing, as a former blessing : where thou art an 
ancient tenant, thou wilt look to be preferred before a 
stranger; and that is thy title to God’s future mercies, if 
thou have been formerly accustomed to them.—Though thou 
be but a tabernacle of earth, God shall raise thee piece by 










126 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


piece into a spiritual building; and after one story of 
creation, and another of vocation, and another of sanctifi¬ 
cation, He shall bring thee up to meet thyself in the bosom of 
thy God, where thou wast at first in an eternal election. God 
is a circle Himself; and He will make thee one : go not 
| thou about to square either circle, to bring that which is 
| equal in itself to angles and corners, into dark and sad sus- 
| picions of God, or of thyself, that God can give, or that thou 
canst receive, no more mercy than thou hast had already.” 

Our poets too still bring forward this pronoun now and 
then for the sake of distinguishing their language from that 
of prose : but they are seldom guided by any determinate 
| principle, or even by any clear perception of the occasions 
| when it may be appropriate. It is perhaps a singular pheno- 
i menon in a cultivated language, that scarcely a writer seems 
| to know when he ought to use such words as thou, you, 
and ye. 

Even the Quakers, at least of late years, as they have been 
j gradually paring away the other tokens of their sect, their 
coats and hats and bonnets, generally soften the full-mouthed 
| thou into thee; whereby moreover they gain the advantage of 
I a twofold offense against grammar. For this seems to be 
one of the ways in which an Englishman delights to 
j display his love of freedom,—by riding over grammatical 
rules. A Quaker will now say, Do thee wish for this 2 Will 
j thee come to me 2 thus getting rid of what in our language is 
felt to be such an incumbrance, one of our few remaining 
grammatical inflexions. Perhaps our aversion to using the 
second person of the verb may not have been inoperative 
in expelling thou from our speech. In truth it is by no means 
so apt a word for expressing the personality of another sym¬ 
bolically, as tu and du; by which the lips are protruded 
toward the person we are addressing, pointing to him, and 
almost shaping themselves for a kiss; as though they belonged 
to a world in which all mankind were brethren. You in this 
respect has the better of thou. 

As George Foxes attempt to thou and fraternize all man¬ 
kind was coincident with the outbreak of our Rebellion, so 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


127 


| 

at the beginning of the French Revolution it became the ' 
fashion to fraternize and tutoyer everybody. At first this 
may strike us as another of the thousand and one examples 
of extremes meeting. But frequent as such meetings are, 
the general formule which embraces, does not explain them : 
and though there were great and glaring differences between 
the Jacobins and the early Quakers, there were also several 
points of resemblance. They had the same eager dislike of 
every existing institution, on the mere ground of its existing, 

—the same unhesitating trust in their own impulses, whether 
regarded as the dictates of the Spirit, or of reason : they 
both cherisht the same delusive notion, that by pruning and 
lopping they should regenerate mankind. The practice of 
thouing belonged to them both: the refusal of respect to 
authority and rank belonged to them both: both indulged in a 
dream of universal peace. The Jacobinical metonomatosis 
of the months, and of the days of the week, might be lookt 
upon as a parody of the Quakerian : only their hatred of all 
religion extended even to these relics of Polytheism : and it 
was an act suited to the vermin that were then breeding and 
crawling about the mouldering carcass of European society, 
to revive the notion, which has been ascribed to Pythagoras, 
that number is the only god. 

It is cheering to observe, how even in these things patient 
endurance is far mightier than violence, feeble as the one, 
powerful as the other may appear at the moment. What¬ 
ever is good strikes root: Nature and Time delight to 
foster it : so long as its spirit lasts, they preserve it; and 
often long after. But evil they reject and disgorge. George 
Foxes institution still subsists after the lapse of two centu¬ 
ries : that of the Jacobins soon past away; though not with¬ 
out leaving a trace behind. “ Le tutoiement (says Bonald, 
Pensees , p. 29) s’est retranche dans la famille : et apres avoir 
tutoye tout le monde, on ne tutoie plus que ses pere et mere. 

Cet usage met toute la maison a l’aise : il dispense les parens 
d’autorite, et les enfans de respect.” This seems over-severe. 
When a like change took place in Germany at the end of the 
last century, and was reprehended as an instance of pert 










128 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

forwardness, it was replied that, in speaking to our Heavenly 
Father, we always call him Thou. It is a sign how lamen¬ 
tably the sense of the true relation between a father and a 
son had decayed, that it should have been deemed right to 
enforce the reverence of the son by clothing him in the stiff 
forms of conventional breeding. In some recent works of 
fiction, petulant children are represented as saying Du to 
parents, w r hile the modest and wellbred shew their respect 
by using Sie. Of Solger, it is related, in the Preface to 
his Remains, that, when he was a boy, he and his younger 
brother used to call each other Sie, which, in their childish 
quarrels, gave a comic solemnity to their tone. In those 
letters of deep, passionate love, which have just been exposed 
to the eyes of all Europe in consequence of an unheard of 
crime, the illfated Duchess of Praslin ordinarily addresses her 
miserable husband with the familiar tu, but at times, assum¬ 
ing the language of outraged dignity, uses vous. Among the 
Germans, it is well known that to thou a person is a sign of 
the most intimate friendship. When Zelter sends Goethe an 
account of the death of his son, Goethe in his answer tacitly 
for the first time calls him du, as it were, saying, I will do 
what I can to replace thy lost son by being a brother to thee. 

This substitution of the plural you for the singular thou is 
only one among many devices which have been adopted for 
the sake of veiling over the plainspeaking familiarity of the 
latter. The Germans commonly call you they; the Italians 
she and her, which may be regarded as a type of their national 
effeminacy. In the Malay languages, we are told by Marsden, 
a variety of substitutes for the first and second pronoun are 
in use, by which the speaker betokens his own inferiority, or 
the superiority of the person he is addressing. This seems 
to be common in Oriental languages, and answers to what 
we often find in the Bible ; for instance in 2 Samuel, c. xix. 

In Asia man seems hardly to have found out his own 
personality, or that of others. XJ. 

After all, they are strange and mighty words, these two 
little pronouns, I and Thou, the mightiest perhaps in the 

-1 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 129 

whole compass of language. The name Pronoun indeed is 
not quite strictly appropriate to them : for, as the great 
master of the philosophy of language, William Humboldt, ob¬ 
serves, “ they are not mere substitutes for the names of the 
persons for whom they stand, but involve the personality of 
the speaker, and of the person spoken to, and the relation 
between them.” I is the word which man has in common 
with God, the Eternal, Self-existing I AM. Thou is the 
word with which God and his Conscience speak to man, the 
word with which man speaks and communes with God and 
his neighbour. All other words, without these two, would 
belong to things : I and Thou are inseparable from person¬ 
ality, and bestow personality on whatever they are applied 
to. They are the two primary elements and conditions of 
all speech, which implies a speaker, and a person spoken to : 
and they are the indispensable complements, each to the 
other; so that neither idea could have been called forth in 
man without the help of its mate. 

This is why it was not good for man to be alone. What 
in truth would Adam have been, if Eve had never been 
created ? What was he before her creation 1 A solitary /, 
without a thou. Can there be such a being ? Can the human 
mind be awakened, except by the touch of a kindred mind % 
Can the spark of consciousness be elicited, except by colli¬ 
sion % Or are we to believe that his communion with God 
was intimate enough to supply the place of communion with 
beings of his own kind 1 

The indispensableness of an object to arouse the subject is 
finely set before us in Troilus and Cressida, in the Dialogue 
between Ulysses and Achilles. 

Ulysses. A strange fellow here 

Writes me that man,—how dearly ever parted, 

How much in having, or without, or in,— 

Cannot make boast to have that which he hath, 

Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflexion : 

As when his virtues shining upon others 
Heat them, and they retort that heat again 
To the first giver. 

AchiUes. This is not strange, Ulysses. 

The beauty that is borne here in the face 


K 



130 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


The bearer knows not, but commends itself 
To others eyes : nor doth the eye itself, 

That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself, 

Not going from itself: but eye to eye opposed 
Salutes each other with each other’s form. 

For speculation turns not to itself, 

Till it hath traveld, and is married there 
Where it may see itself. 

Hence it is only by the reciprocal action of these two 
ideas, the continual play and weaving of them one into the 
other, that a true system of philosophy can be constructed. 
In a logical vacuum indeed I may dream that it can stand 
alone : and then it will compass itself about with a huge 
zero, an all-absorbing negation, summing up everything out 
of itself, as Fichte did, in the most audacious word ever 
coined by man, Nicht-ich , or Not-I. His system, a work of 
prodigious energy and logical power, was the philosophical 
counterpart to the political edifice which was set up at the 
same time in France: and its main fallacy was the very 
same, the confounding of the particular subjective mind with 
the eternal, universal mind of the Allwise,—the fancy that, 
as God pours all truth out of Himself, man may in like 
manner draw all truth out of himself,—and the forgetting 
that, beside I and Not-1 , there is also a Thou in the world, 
our relations to whom, in their manifold varieties, are the 
source of all our affections, and of all our duties. 

By the way, some persons may think that we have cause 
to congratulate ourselves on the bareness of our /, which is 
such that nothing can adhere to it; inasmuch as it thereby 
forms a kind of palisade around us, preserving us from the 
inroads of German philosophy. Nobody acquainted with 
the various systems, which have sprung up since Kant sowed 
the teeth of the serpent he had slain, and which have been 
warring against each other from that time forward, can fail 
to perceive that in England they must all have been still¬ 
born, were it solely from the impossibility of forming any 
derivatives or compounds from our I. One cannot stir far 
in those systems without such words as Ichheit, ichheitlich, 
ichlich, Nicht-ich. But the genius of our language would 
never have allowed people to talk about Ihood, Ihoodly, Ily, 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


131 


JVot-I. Like the sceptre of Achilles, our I oviTore <pv\\a Kai 
o£ovs $vcrci, hreibfj npcora roprjp ev opeao-i \t\ourev. 

And this, which is true of our pronoun, is also true of 
that for which it stands. No old stick, no iron bar, no bare 
I, can be more unproductive and barren than Self, when 
cut off and isolated from the tree on which it was set to 
grow. u. 

Everybody has heard of one speech in Seneca’s Medea t 
small as may be the number of those whose acquaintance 
with that poet has gone much further. In truth the very 
conception of a tragedy written by a Stoic is anything but 
inviting, and may be deemed scarcely less incongruous than 
a garden of granite. Nor would this furnish an unsuitable 
emblem of those tragedies : the thoughts are about as hard 
and stiff; and the characters have almost as much life in them. 

Still there is one speech in them, which is sufficiently 
notorious. When Medea’s nurse exhorts her to be patient, 
by urging the forlornness of her situation, reminding her 
how 

Abiere Colchi; conjugis nulla est fides ; 

Nihil que superest opibus e tantis tibi; 

she answers, Medea superest: and thus far her answer is a 
fine one. But the rhetorician never knew when to have 
done, in the accumulation either of gold or of words. For, 
while truth and genius are simple and brief, affectation and 
hypocrisy, whether moral or intellectual, are conscious that 
their words are mere bubbles, and blow them till they burst. 
What follows is wild nonsense : 

Medea superest: hie mare et terras vides, 

Ferrumque, et ignes, et deos, et fulmina. 

Now how should one translate these two words, Medea 
superest ? They are easy enough to construe : but an 
English poet would hardly make her say, Medea is left , or 
Medea remains. The question occurred to me the other day, 
when listening to a modern opera of little worth, except for 
the opportunity it has afforded Madame Pasta for putting 
forth her extraordinary tragic powers; powers to which, as 









132 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


there exhibited, I know not what has been seen comparable 
in any actress, since she who shed such splendour over the 
stage in our younger days, welcomed her son back to Rome. 
Yolumnia, I believe, was the last part Mrs. Siddons ever 
played : at least it was the last I saw her in : and well did 
it become her in the days of her matronly dignity. Even 
now, after near twenty years, I still seem to hear the tone of 
exulting joy and motherly pride, bursting through her efforts 
to repress it, when, raising her kneeling son, she cried, 

Nay, my good soldier, up ! 

My gentle Marcius, worthy Caius, and 
By deed atchieving honour newly-named . . . 

What is it ? Coriolanus must I call thee ? 

Nor will any one easily forget the exclamation with which 
Medea repells Jason’s question, Che mi resta ? the simple 
pronoun Io. The situations are somewhat unlike : but the 
passage is evidently an imitation of that in Seneca’s tragedy, 
or at least has come from it at second or third hand. For 
| Corneille’s celebrated Moi, which the French have extolled as 
| though it had been the grandest word in all poetry, must no 
j doubt have been the medium it past through, being itself 
merely a prior copy of the same original. In the French 
tragedy too a like change has been made from the name to 
j the pronoun : and one feels that this change is imperatively 
required by the spirit of modern times. An ancient poet 
j could not have used the pronoun : a modern poet in such a 
situation could hardly use the proper name. 

But is not this at variance with what was said before about 
the readiness of the ancients, and the comparative reluctance 
j in modern times, to make use of the simple personal pronouns? 

No : for this very contrast arises from the objective 
character of their minds, and the subjective character of 
ours. They had less deep and wakeful feelings connected 
with the personal pronoun, and therefore used it more freely, 

| But* from attaching less importance to it, when they wanted 
j to speak emphatically, they had recourse to the proper name. 
Above all was this the case among the Romans, with whom 
names had a greater power than with any other people ; 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


133 


owing mainly to the political institutions, which gave the 
Roman houses a vitality unexampled elsewhere ; so that the 
same names shine in the Fasti for century after century, 
encircled with the honours of nearly twenty generations. 
Hence a Roman prized and loved his name, almost as some¬ 
thing independent and out of himself, as a kind of household 
god : and he could speak proudly of it, without being with¬ 
held by the bashfulness of vanity. Even the immortality 
which a Greek or Roman lookt chiefly to, was that of his name. 

We on the other hand have been taught that there is 
something within us far more precious and far more lasting 
than anything that is merely outward. Hence the word / 
has a charm and a power, which it never had before, a power 
too which has gone on growing, till of late years it has 
almost swallowed up every other. Two examples of this 
were just now alluded to, Fichte’s egoical philosophy, and 
the French Constitution, in which everything was deduced 
from the rights of man, without regard to the; rights of 
men, or to the necessities of things. The same usurpation 
shews itself under a number of other phases, even in religion. 
Catholic religion has well-nigh been split up into personal, so 
that the very idea of the former is almost lost; and it is the 
•avowed principle of what is called the Religious World, that 
everybody’s paramount, engrossing duty is to take care of 
his own soul. Of which principle the philosophical caricature 
is, that Selfishness is the source of all morality, the ground 
of benevolence, and the only safe foundation for a State to 
build on. Thus the awakening of our self-consciousness, 
which was aroused, in order that, perceiving the hollowness 
and rottenness of that self, we might endeavour to stifle and 
get quit of it, has in many respects rather tended to make 
us more its slaves than ever. In truth it may be said of 
•many a man, that he is impaled upon his I. This is as it 
were the stake, which is driven through the soul of the 
spiritual suicide. 

Still there are seasons, when, asserting its independence of 
all outward things, an / may have great Stoical dignity and 
grandeur ; especially if it rises from the midst of calamities, 








134 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


like a mast still erect and unbending from a wreck. “ Frappe 
deux fois de la foudre,—says De Maistre (Soirees de Saint 
Petersburg, i. 11) alluding to the losses and sufferings he 
had to endure in the Revolution,—je n’ai plus de droit a ce 
qu’on appelle vulgairement bonheur. J’avoue meme qu’avant 
de m’etre raffermi par de salutaires reflexions, il m’est arrive 
trop souvent de me demander a moi-meme, Que me reste-t-il! 
Mais la conscience, a force de me repondre Moi, m’a fait 
rougir de ma foiblesse.” 

In a certain sense moreover, and that a most awful one, 
the question Quid super est ? concerns us all. For to all a 
time will come, when we shall be stript as bare of every 
outward thing, in which we have been wont to trust, as 
Medea could ever be. And one answer which we shall all 
have to make to that question, will be the same as hers. 
When everything else has past away from me, I shall still 
remain. But alas for those who will have no other answer 
than this! u. 


No people, I remarkt just now, ever had so lively a feeling 
of the power of names as the Romans. This is a feature of 
that political instinct, which characterizes them above every 
other nation, and which seems to have taught them from the 
very origin of their state, that their calling and destiny was 
regere imperio populos ; whereby moreover they were endowed 
with an almost unerring sagacity for picking out and appro¬ 
priating all such institutions as were fitted to forward their 
two great works, of conquering and of governing the world. 

In the East we seldom hear of any names, except those of 
the sovereins and their favorites : and those of both classes 
often become extinct before the natural close of their lives. 
In Greece the individual comes forward on the ground of his 
own character, without leaning on his ancestors for support. 
The descendants of Aristides, of Pericles, of Brasidas, were 
scarcely distinguisht from their fellowcitizens. But in Rome 
the name of the house and family predominated over that 
of the individual. It is at Rome that we first find family 
names or surnames, names w T hich do not expire with their 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


135 


owners, but are transmitted from generation to generation, 
carrying down the honours they have already earned, and 
continually receiving fresh influxes of fame. Traces of a 
like institution are indeed perceivable in others of the old 
Italian nations, and even among the Greeks : but it is among 
the Romans that we first become familiar with it, and behold 
its political power. By means of their names, political prin¬ 
ciples, political duties, political affections were imprest on the 
minds of the Romans from their birth. Every member of a 
great house had a determinate course markt out for him, the 
path in which his forefathers had trod : his name admonisht 
him of what he owed to his country. The Yalerii, the Fabii, 
the Claudii, the Comelii had special and mighty motives to 
prompt them to patriotism : and a twofold disgrace awaited 
them, if they shrank from their post. This has been observed 
by Desbrosses, in his Traite du Mecanisme des Langues. 

I “ L’usage des noms hereditaires (he says) a prodigieusement 
influe sur la fa 9 on de penser et sur les moeurs. On sait quel 
admirable effet il a produit chez les Romains. Rien n’a con- 
tribue davantage a la grandeur de la republique que cette 
methode de succession nominale, qui, incorporant, pour ainsi 
dire, a la gloire de l’etat, la gloire des noms hereditaires, 
joignit le patriotisme de race au patriotisme national.” 
Niebuhr (vol. ii. p. 376) has pointed out how the measures 
of eminent Roman statesmen were often considered as heir¬ 
looms, so as to be perfected or revived by namesakes of their 
first proposers, even after the lapse of centuries. And who 
can doubt that the younger Cato’s mind was stirred by the 
renown of the elder 1 or that the example of the first Brutus 
haunted the second, and whispered to him, that it behoved 
him also, at whatsoever cost of personal affection, to deliver 
his country from the tyrant 1 

The same feeling, the same influence of names, manifests 
itself in the history of the Italian Republics. Nor have the 
other nations of modem Europe been without it. Only 
unfortunately the frivolous love of titles, and the petty 
ambition of mounting from one step in the peerage to an¬ 
other, have stunted its power. How much greater and brighter 










136 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

would the great names in our history have been,—the 
names of Howard, and Percy, and Nevile, and Stanley, and 
Wentworth, and Russell,—if so much of their glory had not 
been drawn off upon other titles, which, though persons verst 
in pedigrees know them to belong to the same blood, are not 
associated with them in the minds of the people ! This may 
be one of the reasons why our nobility has produced so few 
great men, that is, considering the means and opportunities 
afforded by our Constitution. Great men rise up into it; 
and a title is put as an extinguisher upon them. What is 
the most gorgeous, highflown title which a soverein of 
France could devise, even were it that of arch-grand-duke, 
compared with the name of Montmorency? The Spanish 
grandees shew a truer aristocratical feeling, in wearing their 
oldest titles, instead of what are vulgarly deemed their highest. 

For the true spirit of an aristocracy is not personal, but 
corporate. He who is animated by that spirit, would rather 
be a branch of a great tree, than a sucker from it. The 
demagogue’s aim and triumph is to be lifted up on the 
shoulders of the mob : when thus borne aloft, he exults, 
however unsteady his seat, however rapidly he may be sure 
to fall. But the aristocrat is content to abide within the body 
of his order, and to derive his honour and influence from his 
order, more than from himself. The glory of his ancestors 
is his. Another symptom of the all-engulfing whirl with 
which the feeling of personality has been swallowing up 
everything else for the last century, is the stale, flat ridicule 
lavisht by every witling and dullard on those who take pride 
in an illustrious ancestry. We had become unable to under¬ 
stand any honour but that which was personal, any merit or 
claim but personal. We had dwindled and shrunk into a 
host of bare les. 

Even the way in which a Roman begins his letter heading 
it with his name at full length, was significant. Whereas we 
skulk with ours into a corner, and often pare it down to 
initials. u. 


A rumpled rose-leaf lay in my path. There was one little 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 137 

stain on it: but it was still very sweet. Why was it to bo 
trampled under foot, or lookt on as food for swine 1 


There is as much difference between good poetry and fine 
verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a 
perfumer’s shop. 

When you see an action in itself noble, to suspect the 
soundness of its motive is like supposing everything high, 
mountains among the rest, to be hollow. Yet how many 
unbelieving believers pride themselves on this uncharitable 
folly ! These are your silly vulgar-wise, your shallow men of 
penetration, who measure all things by their own littleness, 
and who, by professing to know nothing else, seem to fancy 
they earn an exclusive right to know human nature. Let 
none such be trusted in their judgements upon any one, not 
even on themselves always. 

Certain writers of works of fiction seem to delight in play¬ 
ing at cup and ball with vice and virtue. Is it right , you 
thought you saw ? you find it to be wrong : wrong ? presto ! 
it has become right. Their hero is a moral prodigy, mostly 
profligate, often murderous, not seldom both; but, whether 
both or either, always virtuous. Possessing, as they inform 
us, a fine understanding, resolved, as he is ever assuring us/ 
to do right in despite of all mankind, he is perpetually falling 
into actions atrocious and detestable,—not from the sinful¬ 
ness of human nature,—not from carelessness, or presump¬ 
tion, or rashly dallying with temptation,—but because the 
world is a moral labyrinth, every winding in which leads to 
monstrous evil. Such an entanglement of circumstances is 
devised, as God never permits to occur, except perhaps in 
extraordinary times to extraordinary men. Into these the 
hero is thrown headlong ; and every foul and bloody step he 
takes, is ascribed to some amiable weakness, or some noble 
impulse, deserving our sympathy and admiration. 

And what fruits do these eccentric geniuses bring us 
from their wilderness of horrours 1 They seduce us into a 






138 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

pernicious belief that feeling and duty are irreconcilable ; and 
thus they hypothetically suspend Providence, to necessitate 
and sanction crime. 

Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose 
in the seventeeth, poetry. 

Taste appreciates pictures : connoisseurship appraises 
them. t. 

We are always saying with anger or wonder, that such and 
such a work of genius is unpopular. Yet how can it be 
otherwise? Surely it would be a contradiction, were the 
most extraordinary books in a language the commonest; at 
least till they have been made so by fashion, which, to say 
nothing of its capriciousness, is oligarchal. 

Are you surprised that our friend Matthew has married 
such a woman ? and surprised too, because he is a man of 
genius ? That is the very reason of his doing it. To be 
sure she came to him without a shift to her back: but his 
genius is rich enough to deck her out in purple and fine 
linen. So long as these last, all will go on comfortably. 
But when they are worn out and the stock exhausted, alas 
.poor wife ! shall I say ? or alas poor Matthew ! 


Jealousy is said to be the offspring of Love. Yet, unless 
the parent makes haste to strangle the child, the child will 
not rest till it has poisoned the parent. a. 

Man has, 

First, animal appetites; and hence animal impulses. 

Secondly, moral cravings; either unregulated by reason, 
which are passions; or regulated and controlled by it, which 
are feelings : hence moral impulses. 

Thirdly, the power of weighing probabilities; and hence 
prudence. 

Fourthly, the vis logica , evolving consequences from 
axioms, necessary deductions from certain principles, whether 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


139 


they be mathematical, as in the theorems of geometry, or 
moral, as of Duty from the idea of God : hence Conscience, 
at once the voice of Duty speaking to the soul, and the ear 
with which the soul hears the commands of Duty. 

This idea, the idea of God, is, beyond all question or com¬ 
parison, the one great seminal principle ; inasmuch as it 
combines and comprehends all the faculties of our nature, 
converging in it as their common centre,—brings the reason 
to sanction the aspirations of the imagination,—impregnates 
law with the vitality and attractiveness of the affections,— 
and establishes the natural, legitimate subordination of the 
body to the will, and of both to the vis logica or reason, by 
involving the necessary and entire dependence of the created 
on the Creator. But, although this idea is the end and the 
beginning, the ocean and the fountain-head of all duty, yet 
are there many contributory streams of principle, to which 
men in all ages have been content to trust themselves. Such 
are the disposition to do good for its own sake, patriotism, 
that earthly religion of the ancients, obedience to law, rever¬ 
ence for parents. 

A few corroborative observations may be added. 

First: passion is refined into feeling by being brought 
under the controll of reason; in other words, by being in 
some degree tempered with the idea of duty. 

Secondly : a deliberate impulse appears to be a contradic¬ 
tion in terms: yet its existence must be admitted, if we 
deny the existence of principles. For there are actions on 
record, which, although the results of predetermination, 
possest all the self-sacrifice of a momentary impulse. The 
conduct of Manlius when challenged by the Gaul, contrasted 
with that of his son on a like occasion, strikingly illustrates 
the difference between principle and impulse: of which 
difference moreover, to the unquestionable exclusion of pru¬ 
dence, the premeditated self-devotion of Decius furnishes 
another instance. 

Thirdly : the mind, when allowed its full and free play, 
prefers moral good, however faintly, to moral evil. Hence 
the old confession, Video meliora, } prologue: and hence are we 



140 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

so much better judges in another’s case than our own. In like 
manner the philosophic Apostle demonstrates the existence 
of the law written in our hearts, from the testimony borne 
by the conscience to our own deeds, and the sentence of 
acquittal or condemnation which we pass on each other. 
And although this preference for good may in most cases be 
so weak, as to require the subsidiary support of promises 
and threats, yet the auxiliary enactment is not to be con¬ 
founded with the primary principle. For, in the Divine Law 
certainly, and, I believe, in Human Law also, where it is not 
the arbitrary decree of ignorance or injustice, the necessity 
and consequent obligation to obedience must have existed, 
at least potentially, from all eternity; Law being an expo¬ 
sition, and not an origination of Duty ; while punishment, 
a thing in its very nature variable, is a subsequent appen¬ 
dage, “ because of transgressions.” Even the approval of con¬ 
science, although coincident with the performance of the act 
approved, must be as distinct from it as effect from cause ; 
not to insist on that approval’s not being confined to duty in 
its highest sense, but being extended on fitting occasions 
both to moral impulses and to prudence. 

F ourthly : there are classes of words, such as generous 
and base , good and bad, right and wrong , which belong to the 
moral feelings and principles contended for, and which have 
no meaning without them : and their existence, not merely 
in the writings of philosophers, but in the mouths of the 
commonalty, should perhaps be deemed enough to establish 
the facts, of which they profess to be the expressions and 
exponents. Surely the trite principle, Ex nihilo nihil Jit, is 
applicable here also, and may for once be enlisted in the 
service of the good cause. But besides, the existence of 
Duty, as in itself an ultimate and satisfactory end, is noto¬ 
riously a favorite topic with great orators ; who can only be 
great, because their more vivid sensibility gives them a deeper 
practical insight into the springs and workings of the human 
heart; and who, it is equally certain, would not even be 
considered great, were their views of humanity altogether 
and fundamentally untrue. Without going back to De- 



GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


141 


mosthenes, the most eloquent writers of our days have 
distinguisht themselves by attacks on the selfish system. 

To the same purpose is the epitaph on Leonidas and his 
Spartans : They fell in obedience to the laws. Were not 
obedience a duty in itself, without any reference to a penalty, 
this famous epitaph would dwindle into an unintelligible 
synonym for They died to escape whipping. On the other 
hand, were not such obedience possible, the epitaph would 
be rank nonsense. 


The fact is, if the doctrines of the selfish philosophers,—as 
I must call them, in compliance with usage, and for lack of 
a more appropriate name, though they themselves, were they 
consistent, would shrink from the imputation of anything so 
fantastical and irrational as the love of wisdom , and would 
rather be styled systematic selfseekers,—if, I say, their 
doctrines are true, every book that was ever written, in 
whatsoever language, on whatsoever subject, and of -what¬ 
soever kind, unless it be a mere table of logarithms, ought 
forthwith to be written afresh. For in their present state 
they are all the spawn of falsehood cast upon the waters of 
nonsense. Great need verily is there that this school of 
exenterated rulemongers and eviscerated logicians should set 
about rewriting every book, ay, even their own. For, what¬ 
ever they may have thought, they have been fain to speak 
like the rest of the world, with the single exception of Mr 
Bentham; who, discerning the impossibility of giving vent 
to his doctrines in any language hitherto spoken by man, has 
with his peculiar judgement coined a new gibberish of his 
own for his private circulation. Yet one might wager one 
should not read many pages, before even he would be caught 
tripping. 

Clumsy as this procedure may be, it is at all events 
honester and more straightforward than the course adopted 
by Hobbes ; who, instead of issuing new tokens, such as 
everybody might recognize to be his, chose to retain the 
terms in common use, stamping their impress however on 
the base metal of his own brain, and trying to palm this off 













142 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


as the king’s English. If any one wishes to see the absolute 
incompatibility of the selfish doctrines with the universal 
feelings of mankind, let him read the eighth and ninth 
chapters of Hobbeses Human Nature, and remark how 
audaciously he perverts and distorts the words he pretends 
to explain, as the only means of keeping them from giving 
the lie to his system. It is curious, to what shifts a man, 
who is often a clear thinker, and mostly writes with precision, 
is compelled to resort, when, having mounted the great 
horse of philosophy with his face tailward, he sets off on this 
a posteriori course, shouting, Look ! how fast I am getting on ! 
It is true, instead of coming to meet me, everything seems to be 
running away: but this is only because I have emancipated 
myself from the bondage of gravitation, and can distinguish the 
motion of the earth as it rolls under me ; while all other men 
are swept blindly along with it. 

When one looks merely at the style of Hobbes, and at 
that of Mr Bentham’s later works, it is not easy to conceive 
two writers more different. Yet they have much in common. 
Both have the same shrewdness of practical observation, the 
same clearness of view, so far as the spectacles they have 
chosen to put on allow them to see,—the same fondness for 
stringing everything on a single principle. Both have the 
same arrogant, overweening, contemptuous selfconceit. Both 
look with the same vulgar scorn on all the wisdom of former 
times, and of their own. Both deem they have a monopoly 
of all truth, and that whatever is not of their own manu¬ 
facture is contraband. Both too seem to have been men of 
regular moral habits, having naturally cold and calm tem¬ 
peraments, undisturbed by lively affections, unruffled by 
emotions, with no strong feelings except such as were kindled 
or fanned by self-love. Thus they both reacht a great age, 
exemplifying their systems, so far as this is possible, in their 
own lives ; and they only drew from themselves, while they 
fancied they were representing human nature. 

In knowledge indeed, especially in the variety of his 
information, Mr Bentham was far superior to the sophist of 
Malmsbury; although what made him so confident in his 







GUESSES AT TRUTH. 143 

knowledge, was that it was only half-knowledge. He wanted 
the higher Socratic half, the knowledge of his own ignorance. 
Hobbes, it is said, was wont to make it a boast, that he had 
read so little; for that, if he had read as much as other 
men, he should have been as ignorant. What his ignorance 
in that case might have been, we cannot judge; but it 
could not well have been grosser than what he is perpe¬ 
tually displaying. To appreciate the arrogance of his boast, 
we must remember that he was the friend of Selden ; who, 
while his learning embraced the whole field of knowledge, 
was no way inferior to Hobbes in the vigour of his practical 
understanding, and in sound, sterling, desophisticating sense 
was far superior to him. 

As to the difference in style between the two chiefs of the 
selfish school, it answers to that in their political opinions. 
For a creed, which acknowledges no principles beyond the 
figments of the understanding, may accommodate itself to 
any form of government; not merely submitting to it, as 
Christianity does, for conscience sake, but setting it up as 
excellent in itself, and worshiping it. Accordingly we find 
them diverging into opposite extremes. While Hobbes 
bowed to the ground before the idol of absolute monarchy, 
his successor’s leanings were all in favour of democracy. 
The former, caring only about quiet, and the being able to 
pursue his studies undisturbed, wisht to leave everything as 
it was; and thus in style too conformed, so far as his 
doctrines allowed, to common usage. Mr Bentham on the 
other hand, as he ever rejoiced to see society resolving into 
its elements, seemed desirous to throw back language also 
into a chaotic state. Unable to understand organic unity 
and growth, he lookt upon a hyphen as the one bond of 
union. u. 


By a happy contradiction, no system of philosophy gives 
such a base view of human nature, as that which is founded 
on self-love. So sure is self-love to degrade whatever it 
touches. u * 





144 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


There have indeed been minds overlaid by much reading, 
men who have piled such a load of books on their heads, 
their brains have seemed to be squasht by them. This 
however was not the character of the learned men in the age 
of Hobbes. Though they did not all rise to a commanding 
highth above the whole expanse of knowledge, like Scaliger, 
or like Niebuhr in our times, so as to survey it at once with 
a mighty, darting glance, discerning the proportions and 
bearings of all its parts j yet the scholars of those days had 
no slight advantages, on the one hand in the comparative 
narrowness and unity of the field of knowledge, and on the 
other hand in the labour then required to traverse it ; above 
all, in the discipline of a positive education, and in having 
determinate principles, according to which every fresh 
accession of information was to be judged and disposed of. 
Their principles may have been mixt up with a good deal of 
errour ; but at all events they were not at the mercy of the 
winds, to veer round and round with every blast. Their 
knowledge too was to be drawn, not at second or third or 
tenth hand, from abstracts and abridgements, and com¬ 
pilations and compendiums, and tables of contents and 
indexes, but straight from the original sources. Hence they 
had a firmer footing. They often knew not how to make a 
right use of their knowledge, and lackt critical discri¬ 
mination : but few of them felt their learning an incum¬ 
brance, or were disabled by it for walking steadily. Thus 
even in their scantiness of means there w r ere advantages ; 
just as, according to the great law of compensation, riches 
of every kind have their disadvantages. That which we 
acquire laboriously, by straining all our faculties to win it, 
is more our own, and braces our minds more. Even in 
Melanchthon’s time this was felt, and that the greater 
facilities in obtaining books were not purely beneficial. The 
exercise of transcribing the ancient writers, he tells his 
pupils (Oper. hi. 378), had its good. “Demosthenes fertur 
octies descripsisse Thucydidem. Ego ipse Pauli Epistolam 
ad Romanos Graecam ter descripsi. Ac memini me ex 
Capnione audire, quondam eo solidius fuisse doctos homines, 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


145 


quia certos auctores, et in qualibet arte praecipuos, cum 
manu sua singuli describerent, penitus ediscebant. Nunc 
distrahi studia, nec immorari ingenia certis auctoribus, vel 
scribendo, vel legendo.” It is true, there is an aptness to 
exaggerate the evils of improvements, as well as the benefits; 
and a man may be great in spite of his riches, even as he 
may enter into the Kingdom of Heaven in spite of them. 
But great men are such by an inward power, not through 
outward means, and may be all the greater for the want of 
those means. 

Yet on the other hand in Bacon himself one may perceive 
that many of the flaws, which here and there disfigure his 
writings, would have vanisht if he had entertained less dis¬ 
paraging notions of his predecessors, and not allowed 
himself to be dazzled by the ambition of being in all things 
the reformer of philosophy. Even if learning were mere 
ballast, a large and stout ship will bear a heavy load of it, 
and sail all the better. But a wise man will make use of 
his predecessors as rowers, who will waft him along far more 
rapidly and safely, and over a far wider range of waters, 
than he could cross in any skiff of his own. Adopting 
Bacon’s image, that we see beyond antiquity, from standing 
upon it, at all events we must take up our stand there, and 
not kick it from under us : else we ourselves fall along with 
it. True wisdom is always catholic, even when protesting 
the most loudly and strongly. It knows that the real stars 
are those which move on calmly and peacefully in the midst 
of their heavenly brotherhood. Those which rush out from 
thence, and disdain communion with them, are no stars, but 
fleeting, perishable meteors. 

Even in poetry, he would be a bold man who would assert 
that Milton’s learning impaired his genius. At times it 
may be obtrusive j but it more than makes amends for this 
at other times. Or would Virgil, would Horace, would 
Gray, have been greater poets, had they been less familiar 
with those who went before them 1 ? For this is the real 
question. They must be compared with themselves, not 
with other poets more richly gifted by Nature. 











146 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Desultory reading is indeed very mischievous, by fostering 
habits of loose, discontinuous thought, by turning the 
memory into a common sewer for rubbish of all sorts to float 
through, and by relaxing the power of attention, which of all 
our faculties most needs care, and is most improved by it. 
But a well-regulated course of study will no more weaken 
the mind, than hard exercise will weaken the body : nor 
will a strong understanding be weighed down by its 
knowledge, any more than an oak is by its leaves, or than. 
Samson was by his locks. He whose sinews are drained by 
his hair, must already be a weakling. u. 

We may keep the devil without the swine, but not the 
swine without the devil. 


The Christian religion may be lookt upon under a twofold 
aspect,—as revealing and declaring a few mysterious 
doctrines, beyond the grasp and reach of our reason,—and as 
confirming and establishing a number of moral truths, 
which, from their near and evident connexion with our 
social wants, might enter into a scheme of religion, such as 
a human legislator would devise. 

The Divine origin of any system confining itself to truths 
of the latter kind would be liable to strong suspicions. For 
what a mere man is capable of deducing, will not rise high 
enough to have flowed down from heaven. On the other 
hand a system composed wholly of abstruse doctrines, 
however it might feed the wonder of the vulgar, could never 
have been the gift of God. A Being who knows the 
extent of our wants, and the violence of our passions,—all 
whose ordinary dispensations moreover are fraught with 
usefulness, and stampt with love,—such a Being, our Maker, 
could never have sent us an unfruitful revelation of strange 
truths, which left men in the condition it found them in, as 
selfish, as hardhearted, as voluptuous. Accordingly, as 
Dr. Whately has shewn in his Essays on some Peculiarities of 
the Christian Religion, the practical character of a Revelation, 
and its abstaining from questions of mere curiosity, is an 









GUESSES AT TRUTH, 147 

essential condition, or at least a very probable mark of its 

truth. 

Christianity answers the anticipations of Philosophy in 
both these important respects. Its precepts are holy and 
imperative ; its mysteries vast, undiscoverable, unimaginable; 
and, what is still worthier of consideration, these two limbs 
of our Religion are not severed, or even laxly joined, but, 
after the workmanship of the God -of Nature, so “lock in 
with and overwrap one another,” that they cannot be torn 
asunder without rude force. Every mystery is the germ of 
a duty : every duty has its motive in a mystery. So that, 
if I may speak of these things in the symbolical language of 
ancient wisdom,—everything divine being circular, every 
right thing human straight,—the life of the Christian may 
be compared to a chord, each end of which is supported by 
the arc it proceeds from and terminates in. 

Were not the mysteries of antiquity, in their practical 
effect, a sort of religious peerage, to embrace and absorb 
those persons whose enquiries might endanger the establisht 
belief 1 ? If so, it is a strong presumption in favour of 
Christianity, that it contains none ; especially as it borrows 
no aid from castes. 


A use must have preceded an abuse, properly so called. 


Nobody has ever been able to change today into tomorrow, 
—or into yesterday; and yet everybody, who has much 
energy of character, is trying to do one or the other. u. 

I could hardly feel much confidence in a man who had 
never been imposed upon. u. 

There are instances, a physician has told me, of persons, 
who, having been crowded with others in prisons so ill 
ventilated as to breed an infectious fever, have yet escaped it, 
from the gradual adaptation of their constitutions to the 
noxious atmosphere they had generated. This avoids the 








143 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


inference so often drawn, as to the harmlessness of mis¬ 
chievous doctrines, from the innocent lives of the men with 
whom they originated. To form a correct judgement con¬ 
cerning the tendency of any doctrine, we should rather look 
at the fruit it bears in the disciples, than in the teacher. 
For he only made it; they are made by it. 

La pobreza no es vileza, Poverty is no disgrace, says the 
Biscayan proverb. Paupertas ridiculos homines facit, says 
the Roman satirist. Is there an Englishman, who, being 
askt which is the wiser and better saying, would not 
instantly answer, The first ? Yet how many are there, who 
half an hour after would not quiz a poor gentleman’s coat 
or dinner, if the thought of it came across them ? Be 
consistent, for shame, even in evil. But no! still be 
inconsistent ; that your practice, thus glaringly at variance 
with your principle, may sooner fall to the ground. 

Who wants to see a masquerade ? might be written under a 
looking-glass. u. 

Languages are the barometers of national thought and 
character. Horne Tooke, in attempting to fix the quicksilver 
for his own metaphysical ends, acted much like a little 
playfellow of mine, at the first school I was at, who screwed 
the master s weatherglass up to fair, to make sure of a fine 
day for a holiday. 

Every age has a language of its own; and the difference 
in the words is often far greater than in the thoughts. The 
main employment of authors, in their collective capacity, is 
to translate the thoughts of other ages into the language of 
their own. Nor is this a useless or unimportant task : for it is 
the only way of making knowledge either fruitful or powerful. 

Reviewers are for ever telling authors, they can’t under¬ 
stand them. The author might often reply: Is that my 
fault ? u. 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 149 

The climate might perhaps have absorbed the intellect of 
Greece, instead of tempering it to a love of beauty, but for 
the awakening and stirring excitements of a national 'poem, 
barbaric wars, a confined territory, republican institutions 
and the activity they generate, the absence of any recluse 
profession, and a form of worship in which art predominated. 
The poets of such a people would naturally be lyrical. But 
at Athens Homer, the Dionysiacs, and Pericles, by their 
united influence, fostered them into dramatists. The glories 
of their country inspired them with enthusiastic patriotism ; 
and an aristocratical religion (which, until it was supplanted 
by a vulgar philosophy, was revered, in spite of all its 
errours,) gave them depth, and made them solemn at least, 
if not sublime. Energy they owed to their contests, and 
correctness to the practist ears of their audience. 

On the other hand, the centurion’s rod, the forum, the 
consulate, Hannibal, and in later times the Civil Wars,— 
pride, and the suppression of feeling taught by pride,— 
Epicureanism, which dwarft Lucretius, though it could not 
stifle him,—the overwhelming perfection of the great Greek 
models, and the benumbing frost of a jealous despotism, 
—would not allow the Romans, except at rare intervals, 
to be poets. Perhaps the greatest in their language is 
Livy. 

Such at least must be the opinion of the author of Gebir, 
whose writings are more deeply impregnated, than those of 
any Englishman of our times, with the spirit of classical 
antiquity. In a note on that singular poem, he goes so far 
as to compare Livy with Shakspeare, and in one respect 
gives the advantage to the Roman. “ Shakspeare (he says) 
is the only writer that ever knew so intimately, or ever 
described so accurately, the variations of the human 
character. But Livy is always great.” The same too must 
have been the opinion of the great historian, who seemed to 
have been raised up, after the lapse of eighteen centuries, to 
revive the glories of ancient Rome, and to teach us far 
more about the Romans, than they ever knew about them¬ 
selves. Niebuhr agrees with Landor in praising Livy’s 



150 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

brilliant talent for the representation of human character; 
while in another place he justly complains of Virgil’s 
inability to infuse life into the shadowy names with which 
he has swelled the muster-roll of his poem. 

South’s sentences are gems, hard and shining : Voltaire’s 
look like them, but are only French paste. 

Kant extends this contrast to the two nations, in his 
Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, where he says, § 4, 
“ In England profound thoughts are native,—tragedy, epic 
poetry, and the massive gold of wit; which is beat out by a 
French hammer into thin leaves of a great superficies.” 


Some men so dislike the dust kickt up by the generation 
they belong to, that, being unable to pass, they lag behind it. 


Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one’s horse as 
he is leaping. U. 

How much better the world would go on, if people could 
but do now and then, what Lord Castlereagh used to depre¬ 
cate, and turn their backs upon themselves ! u. 


The most mischievous liars' are those who keep sliding on 
the verge of truth. u. 


Hardly anything is so difficult in writing, as to write with 
ease. u. 


Contrast is a kind of relation. 


Instead of watching the bird as it flies above our heads, 
we chase his shadow along the ground; and finding we 
cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing. 

There is something odd in the disposition of an English¬ 
man’s senses. He sees with his fingers, and hears with his 
toes. Enter a gallery of pictures : you find all the spectators 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 151 

longing to become handlers. Go to hear an opera of Mozart’s: 
your next neighbour keeps all the while kicking time ... as 
if he could not kill it without. u. 


Excessive indulgence to others, especially to children, is in 
fact only self-indulgence under an alias. U. 


Poverty breeds wealth ; and wealth in its turn breeds 
poverty. The earth, to form the mound, is taken out of 
the ditch ; and whatever may be the highth of the one, will 
be the depth of the other. 

Pliny speaks of certain animals that will fatten on smoke. 
How lucky would it be for sundry eloquent statesmen, if they 
could get men to do so ! u. 


The great cry with everybody is, Get on ! get on ! just as 
if the world were traveling post. How astonisht people 
will be, when they arrive in heaven, to find the angels, who 
are so much wiser, laying no schemes to be made archangels! 


Is not every true lover a martyr 1 u. 

Unitarianism has no root in the permanent principles of 
human nature. In fact it is a religion of accidents, depending 
for its reception on a particular turn of thought, a particular 
state of knowledge, and a particular situation in society. 
This alone is a sufficient disproof of it. 

But moreover its postulates involve the absurdity of 
coupling infinity with man. No wonder that, beginning 
with raising him into a god, it has ended with degrading 
him into a beast. In attempting to erect a Babel on a 
foundation of a foot square, the Socinians constructed a 
building which, being top-heavy, overturned; and its bricks, 
instead of stopping at the ground, struck into it from the 
violence of the fall. _ 

Calvinism is not imaginative. To stand therefore, it 










152 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


should in some degree be scientific : whereas no system of 
f Christianity presents greater difficulties to the understanding, 
none so great to the moral sense. Heavy as these difficulties, 
are, the unbending faith of the Swiss Reformer would have 
borne up under still heavier. But after a few generations, 
when zeal subsides, such a weight is found to be inconvenient ^ 
and men loosen the articles which press the hardest, until 
they slip off one after another. Scepticism however, like 
other things, is enlarged and pampered by indulgence : as- 
the current gets more sluggish, the water gets thicker : and 
the dregs of Calvinism stagnate into Socinianism. 

A Christian is God Almighty’s gentleman: a gentleman, 
in the vulgar, superficial way of understanding the word, is 
the Devil’s Christian. But to throw aside these polisht and. 
too current counterfeits for something valuable and sterling, 
the real gentleman should be gentle in everything, at least 
in everything that depends on himself,—in carriage, temper, 
constructions, aims, desires. He ought therefore to be mild, 
i calm, quiet, even, temperate,—not hasty in judgement, not 
! exorbitant in ambition, not overbearing, not proud, not 
j rapacious, not oppressive ; for these things are contrary to 
gentleness. Many such gentlemen are to be found, I trust; 
and many more would be, were the true meaning of the 
name borne in mind and duly inculcated. But alas ! we are 
misled by etymology; and because a gentleman was origi¬ 
nally homo gentilis, people seem to fancy they shall lose caste, 
unless they act as Gentiles. 

To no kind of begging are people so averse, as to begging 
pardon; that is, when there is any serious ground for doing 
so. When there is none, this phrase is as soon taken in 
vain, as other momentous words are upon light occasions. 
On the other hand there is a kind of begging which every¬ 
body is forward enough at; and that is, begging the 
question. Yet surely a gentle-man should be as ready to 
do the former, as a reasonable man should be loth to do the 
latter. 


u. 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 153 

What a proof it is that the carnal heart is enmity, to find 
that almost all our prejudices are against others ! so much, 
so indeed, that this has become an integral part of the word : 
whatever is to a man’s prejudice, is to his hurt. Nay, I 
have sometimes found it hard to convince a person, that it 
is possible to have a prejudice in favour of another. It is 
only Christian love, that can believe all things, and hope all 
things, even of our fellow-creatures. 

But is there not a strange contradiction here ? The 
carnal heart, which thinks so basely of its neighbours, thinks 
haughtily of itself: while the Christian, who knows and 
feels the evil of his own nature, can yet look for good in his 
neighbours. How is this to be solved 1 

Why, it is only when blinded by selflove, that we can 
think proudly of our nature. Take away that blind ; and 
in our judgements of others we are quicksighted enough to 
see there is very little in that nature to rely on. Whereas 
the Christian can hope all things; because he grounds his 
hope, not on man, but on God, and trusts that the same 
power which has wrought good in him, will also work good 
in his neighbour. u. 

Temporary madness may perhaps be necessary in some 
cases, to cleanse and renovate the mind; just as a fit of 
illness is to carry off the humours of the body. 

A portrait has one advantage over its original: it is 
unconscious : and so you may admire, without insulting it. 
I have seen portraits which have more. u. 

A compliment is usually accompanied with a bow, as if to 
beg pardon for paying it. a. 

Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the 
vessel. 

Children always turn toward the light. 0 that grown-up 
people in this would become like little children. u. 









154 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

Civilization takes the heart, and sticks it beside the head, 
just where Spurzheim finds the organ of acquisitiveness. No 
wonder she fancies she has elevated man altogether, since she 
has thus raised the most valuable part of him, and at the 
same time has thus enlarged the highest. 

Men have often been warned against old prejudices: I 
would rather warn them against new conceits. The novelty 
of an opinion on any moral question is a presumption against 
it. Generally speaking, it is only the half-thinker, who, in 
matters concerning the feelings and ancestral opinions of 
men, stumbles on new conclusions. The true 'philosopher 
searches out something else,—the propriety of the feeling, 
the wisdom of the opinion, the deep and living roots of what¬ 
ever is fair or enduring. For on such points, to use a happy 
phrase of Dugald Stewart’s ( Philosophy of the Human Mind , 
ii. 75), “our first and third thoughts will be found to 
coincide.” 

Burke was a fine specimen of a third-thoughted man. So 
in our own times, consciously and professedly, was Coleridge; 
who delighted in nothing more than in the revival of a 
dormant truth, and who ever lookt over the level of the 
present age to the hills containing the sources and springs 
whereby that level is watered. Let me cite an instance of 
what I mean from the life of Jeremy Taylor, by . . the title 
has, Reginald Heber. So let me call him then. I only anti¬ 
cipate the affectionate familiarity of future ages, in whose 
ears (as a friend of mine well prophesies) the Bishop of Cal¬ 
cutta will sound as strange, as the Bishop of Down and Connor 
would in ours. The passage I refer to is a defense of the 
good old institution of sizars, or poor scholars. Its length 
prevents my quoting it entire; but I cannot forbear enrich¬ 
ing my pages with some of the concluding sentences. “ It is 
easy to declaim against the indecorum and illiberality of 
depressing the poorer students into servants. But it would 
be more candid, and more consistent with truth, to say that 
our ancestors elevated their servants to the rank of students; 
softening, as much as possible, every invidious distinction, 





GUESSES AT TRUTH. 155 

and rendering the convenience of the wealthy the means of 
extending the benefits of education to those whose poverty 
must otherwise have shut them out from the springs of 
knowledge. And the very distinction of dress, which has so 
often been complained of, the very nature of those duties, 
which have been esteemed degrading, were of use in prevent¬ 
ing the intrusion of the higher classes into situations intended 
only for the benefit of the poor; while, by separating the last 
from the familiar society of the wealthier students, they pre¬ 
vented that dangerous emulation of expense, which in more 
modem times has almost excluded them from the Univer¬ 
sity.” (p. ix.) # 

Was it superfluous to quote a passage, which my readers 
were already acquainted with? I rejoice to hear it; and 
wish I could believe they had as good cause for objecting to 
the following extract from Coleridge’s Literary Biography 
(ii. p. 60), containing a similar apology for a practice dic¬ 
tated by natural feelings, but which has often been severely 
condemned. “ It is no less an errour in teachers, than a 
torment to the poor children, to enforce the necessity of read¬ 
ing as they would talk. In order to cure them of singing , as 
it is called,—the child is made to repeat the words with his 
eyes from off the book; and then indeed his tones resemble 
talking, as far as his fears, tears, and trembling will permit. 
But as soon as the eye is again directed to the printed page, j 
the spell begins anew: for an instinctive sense tells the child, 
that to utter its own momentary thoughts, and to recite the 
written thoughts of another, as of another, and a far wiser 

* The foregoing page was just printed off, when the news came that 
India had lost its good Bishop. At the time when I ventured on that 
passing mention of him, I was little disturbed by the thought of its 
inadequateness; knowing that it would not offend him, if the passage 
ever chanced to meet his eye. He would have deemed himself beholden 
to the meanest stranger for an offering of honest admiration, and, I 
doubted not, would accept my tribute of gratitude and affection with his 
wonted gentleness. And now . . . now that he has been taken from us 
. why should I not declare the truth ? Though I should have rejoiced 
to speak of him worthily, if God had given me the power to speak worthily 
of such a man, yet, being what I am, that I have said no more does not 
pain me. . . perhaps because my heart seems to say, that love and sorrow 
make all gifts equal. 









156 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

than himself, are two widely different things; and as the two 
acts are accompanied with widely different feelings, so must 
they justify different modes of enunciation.” 

My introductory remarks however, I scarcely need add, 
apply to ends only, not to means. For means are variable; 
ends continue the same. The road from London to Edin¬ 
burgh may he improved; horses may become swifter, 
carriages lighter : but Edinburgh seems likely to stay pretty 
nearly in the same spot where it is now. 

The next best thing to a very good joke, is a very bad 
joke : the next best thing to a very good argument, is a very 
bad one. In wit and reasoning, as in the streets of Paris, 
you must beware of the old maxim, medio tutissimus ibis. In 
that city it would lead you into the gutter: in your intel¬ 
lectual march it would sink you in the dry, sandy wastes of 
dulness. But the selfsame result, which a good joke or a 
good argument accomplishes regularly and according to law, 
is now and then reacht by their misshapen brethren per 
saltum , as a piece of luck. 

Few trains of logic, however ingenious and fine, have given 
me so much pleasure,—and yet a good argument is among 
dainties one of the daintiest,—few, very few, have so much 
pure truth in them, as the exclamation, How good it was of 
God to put Sunday at one end of the week ! for , if He had put 
it in the middle , He would have made a broken week of it. The 
feeling here is so true and strong, as to overpower all percep¬ 
tion of the rugged way along which it carries us. It gains 
its point; and that is all it cares for. It knows nothing of 
doubt or faintheartedness, but goes to work much like our 
sailors : everybody, who does not know them, swears they 
must fail; yet they are sure to succeed. He who is animated 
with such a never hesitating, never questioning conviction 
that every ordinance of God is for good, although he may 
miss the actual good in the particular instance, cannot go far 
wrong in the end. 

There is a speech of a like character related in Mr Turner’s 
Tour in Normandy (i. p. 120). He entered one day into con- 





GUESSES AT TRUTH. 157 

versation with a Frenchman of the lower orders, a religious 
man, whom he found praying before a broken cross. They 
were sitting in a ruined chapel. “ The devotee mourned over 
its destruction, and over the state of the times which could 
countenance such impiety ; and gradually, as he turned over 
the leaves of the prayer-book in his hand, he was led to read 
aloud the 137th Psalm, commenting on every verse as he 
proceeded, and weeping more and more bitterly, when he 
came to the part commemorating the ruin of Jerusalem, 
which he applied to the captive state of France, exclaiming 
against Prussia as cruel Babylon. Yet, we askt, how can you 
reconcile with the spirit of Christianity the permission given to 
the Jews by the Psalmist to take up her little ones and dash 
them against the stones ?—Ah ! you misunderstand the sense ; 
the Psalm does not authorize cruelty : mais, attendez ! ce n'est 
p>as ainsi: ces pierres-ld sont Saint Pierre; et heureux celui 
qui les attachera ct Saint Pierre ; qui montrera de V attache- 
ment, de Vintrepidite pour pa religion / This is a specimen of 
the curious perversions under which the Roman Catholic 
faith does not scruple to take refuge.” 

“Surely in other thoughts Contempt might die.” The 
question was at best very thoughtless and illjudged : its 
purpose was to unsettle the poor man’s faith : it offered no 
solution of the doubts it suggested : and no judicious person 
will so address the uneducated. But it is cheering to see 
how the Frenchman takes up the futile shaft, and tosses it 
back again, and finds nothing but an occasion to shew the 
entireness of his faith. Moreover, though Mr. Turner hardly 
thought it, there is much more truth in the reply than in the 
question. All that there is in the latter, is one of those 
half truths, which, by setting up alone, bankrupt themselves, 
and become falsehoods; while the Frenchman begins in 
truth, and ends in truth, taking a somewhat strange course 
indeed to get from one point to the other. Still in him we 
perceive, though in a low and rude state, that wisdom of the 
heart, that esprit du coeur or mens cordis , which the Broad 
Stone of Honour inculcates so eloquently and so fervently, 
and which, if it be severed from the wisdom of the head, is 



153 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

far the more precious of the two; while in their union it is 
like the odour which in some indescribable way mingles with 
the hues of the flower, softening its beauty into loveliness. 
No truly wise man has ever been without it : but in few 
has it ever been found in such purity and perfection, as in 
the author of that noble manual for gentlemen, that volume 
which, had I a son, I would place in his hands, charging him, 
though such prompting would be needless, to love it next to 
his Bible. 1826. u. 


These words, written eleven years ago, were an expression 
of ardent and affectionate admiration for a book, which 
seemed to me fitted, above almost all others, to inspire 
young minds with the feelings befitting a Christian gentle¬ 
man. They refer to the second edition of the Broad Stone of 
Honour , which came out in 1823. Since that time the author 
has publisht another edition, or rather another work under 
the same title; for but a small portion of the new one is 
taken from the old. To this new one, I regret to say, I 
cannot apply the same terms. Not that it is inferior to the 
former in its peculiar excellences. On the contrary the 
author’s style, both in language and thought, has become 
more mature, and still more beautiful: his reading has been 
continually widening its range; and he pours forth its precious 
stores still more prodigally : and the religious spirit, which 
pervaded the former work, hallows every page of the latter. 
The new Broad Stone is still richer than the old one in 
magnanimous and holy thoughts, and in tales of honour and 
of piety. If one sometimes thinks that the author loses 
himself amid the throng of knightly and saintly personages, 
whom he calls up before us, it is with the feeling with which 
Milton must have regarded the moon, when he likened her 
to i( one that had been led astray Through the heaven’s wide, 
pathless way.” If he strays, it is u through the heaven’s 
wide, pathless way if he loses himself, it is among the 
stars. In truth this is an essential, and a very remarkable 
feature of his catholic spirit. He identifies himself, as few 
have ever done, with the good, and great, and heroic, and 





GUESSES AT TRUTH. 159 

holy, in former times, and ever rejoices in passing out of 
himself into them : he loves to utter his thoughts and feelings 
in their words, rather than his own : and the saints and 
philosophers and warriors of old join in swelling the sacred 
consort which rises heavenward from his pages. 

Nevertheless the new Broad Stone of Honour is not a book 
which can be recommended withput hesitation to the young. 
The very charm, which it is sure to exercise over them, high ten s 
one’s scruples about doing so. For in it the author has come 
forward as a convert and champion of the Romish Church, 
and as the implacable enemy of Protestantism. This pole¬ 
mical spirit is the one great blemish which disfigures this, 
and still more his later work, the Ages of Faith. The object 
he sets himself is, to shew that all good, and hardly anything 
but good, is to be found in the bosom of the Romish Church ; 
and that all evil, and hardly anything but evil, is the growth 
of Protestantism. These propositions he maintains by what 
in any other writer one should call a twofold sophism. But 
Achilles himself was not more incapable of sophistry, than 
the author of the Broad Stone of Honour. No word ever 
dropt from his pen, which he did not thoroughly believe; 
difficult as to us doubleminded men it may seem at times to 
conceive this. Therefore, instead of a twofold sophism, I 
will call it a twofold delusion, a twofold Einseitigkeit , as the 
more appropriate German word is. He culls the choicest 
and noblest stories out of fifteen centuries,—and not merely 
out of history, but out of poetry and romance,—and the purest 
and sublimest morsels of the great religious writers between 
the time of the Apostles and the Reformation: and this 
magnificent spiritual hierarchy he sets before us as a living 
and trustworthy picture of what the Ages of Faith, as he 
terms them, actually were. On the other hand, shutting his 
eyes to what is great and holy in later times, he picks out 
divers indications of baseness, unbelief, pusillanimity, and 
worldlymindedness, as portraying what Europe has become, 
owing to the dissolution of the unity of the Church. Thus, 
in speaking of the worthies of the Reformed Churches, he 
himself not seldom falls into the same strain, which he most 



160 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


justly reprehends in the ordinary Protestant accounts of the 
middle ages. 

Alas ! whithersoever one looks throughout Christendom, 
ev& avepoi nveiovcri dvo Kparepr^s vtt dvdyKrjs, 

Kcu Tv7ros avTLTviros , Kai nrpi e7rt nrjpciTi Keirai. 

But it grieves one to the heart to see those blowing the 
bellows, who ought to be extinguishing the flame. For, 
though wrath is denounced against those who cry Peace , 
Peace ! when there is no peace,—against those who would 
patch up the rent in the Church by daubing it over with 
untempered mortar, who think that indifference to all prin¬ 
ciple is the best cement of union, and that to let the bricks 
lie at sixes and sevens is the surest way of building up a 
house of them ;—it must never be forgotten on the other 
hand that a blessing waits upon the peacemakers, that they 
are the true children of God, and that the most hopeful 
method of restoring the unity of the Church is, while we 
unflinchingly and uncompromisingly uphold every essential 
principle, to maintain all possible candour and indulgence 
with regard to whatever is accidental or personal. 

This is the main difference between the old Broad Stone of 
Honour and the new one. The former breathed a fervent 
longing for the reunion of the Catholic Church : the latter 
is tinged with the anticatholic spirit so common among 
those who would monopolize the name of Catholics, and is 
ever breaking out into hostility against Protestantism. The 
historical views too of the former were more correct. For 
the evidence, which was ample to vindicate the middle ages 
from unconditional reprobation, cannot avail to establish that 
their character was without spot or blemish. Nor does that 
which is erroneous and perverse in modern times, though 
well fitted to humble our supercilious pride, prove that we 
are a mere mass of corruption. An apology is a different 
thing from a eulogy; and even a eulogy should have its 
limits. Nor are hatred and scorn for his own age likely to 
qualify a man for acting upon it and bettering it. 

These remarks will be taken, I hope, as they are meant. 
I could not suffer my former sentence about the Broad Stone 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


161 


of Honour to stand without explanation. Yet it goes against 
one’s heart to retract praise, where love and admiration are 
undimmisht. I trust that nothing I have said will hurt the 
feelings of one, who fulfills, as very few men have fulfilled, 
the idea his writings give of their author, and whom I esteem 
it a blessed privilege to be allowed to number among my 
friends. 1837. u. 


Great changes have taken place in the opinions and feelings 
of many with regard to the Romish Church since the year 
1837. The ignorant, truthless abuse, which had long been 
poured out upon her so unscrupulously, has not indeed ceast 
to flow, nay, may perhaps be as copious as ever : but it has 
provoked a reactionary spirit, which is now pouring out 
apologies and eulogiums, with little more knowledge, and an 
almost equal carelessness about truth. It would be incon¬ 
sistent with the character of this little book to engage in 
such a controversy here. In other places I have been com¬ 
pelled to do so, and, if God gives me life, and power of speech 
and pen, shall have to do so again and again. For this is 
one of the chief battles which we in our days are called to 
wage because of the word of truth and righteousness, a battle, 
about the final issue of which Faith will not let us doubt, 
but in the course of which many intellects will be cast on 
the ground and trampled under foot, many may be made 
captive, and may have their eyes put out, and may even 
learn to glory in their blindness and their chains. Still we 
know with whom the victory is ; and He will give it to the 
Truth, and to us, if we seek it earnestly and devoutly, with 
pure hearts and minds, in her behalf. 

Now among the delusions and fallacies, whereby divers 
minds, apter to follow the impulses of the imagination, than 
to weigh the force and examine the consistency of a logical 
chain, have been led to deck out the Church of Rome with 
charms which do not rightly appertain to her, a chief place, 
I believe, belongs to those which the Broad Stone of Honour 
and the Ages of Faith have set forth with such beauty and 
richness. Hence, though I must reserve the exposition of 










162 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


those fallacies for another occasion, I feel bound to renew 
my protest against the misrepresentations of the whole of 
modern history which run through both these worfts, the 
apotheosis of the Middle Ages, and the apodiabolosis of the 
Reformation and its effects. The author has indeed at¬ 
tempted to reply to my objections in the Epilogue to his last 
volume, and stoutly maintains, though with his usual admire 
able Christian courtesy, that his pictures do not give an erro¬ 
neous impression either of the past or of the present. An 
argument on this issue could not be carried on without long 
details, illsuited to these small pages. Therefore I must leave 
it to the judgement of such as may be attracted to contem¬ 
plate the visions of beauty and holiness which are continually 
rising up in those works. As these visions however, through 
the revolutions of opinion, have now become deceptive, I 
cannot recommend them to the youthful reader, without 
reminding him at the same time that the theological and 
ecclesiastical controversies of the nineteenth century aro 
not to be decided by any selection of the anecdotes or 
apophthegms of the twelfth and thirteenth, and that, even 
for the sake of forming an estimate on the worth of any 
particular period, it is necessary to consider that period iii 
all its bearings, in its worse and baser, as well as in its better 
and nobler features, and in its relative position with reference 
to the historical development of mankind. If the picture 
of the Ages of Faith here presented to us were faithful 
and complete, instead of being altogether partial, it would 
no way avail to prove that Popery in our days is the one 
true form of Christianity, any more than York and Lincoln 
minsters prove that the Italians in our days build finer 
churches than we do. 1847. u. 


Every one who knows anything of Horace or of logic, has 
heard of the accumulating sophism : Do twelve grains make 
a heap ? do eighteen ? do twenty 1 do twenty-four ? Twenty- 
four grains make a heap ! oh no ! they make a pennyweight. 
The reply was well enough for that particular case : but, as 
a general rule, it is safest to answer such captious questions 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


1C3 


by a comparative, the only elastic and nicely graduated 
expression of degree which common language furnishes. Do 
twelve grains of sand make a heap ? A greater than eleven. 
Are a hundred yards far for a healthy man to walk ? 
Further than ninety-nine. 

There is another mode of defense however, which some 
may think sufficient, and for which I must refer my readers 
to Aristotle’s Treatise on Irony. Don't be alarmed at those 
grains of sand f said a philosopher to a young man who 
appeared sadly graveled by the accumulating sophism. The 
sophist is only playing the part of the East-wind in the comedy. 
But you dislike such a quantity of dust blown or thrown so 
palpably into your eyes ? Then put on a veil. 

Friendship closes its eyes, rather than see the moon 
eclipst; while malice denies that it is ever at the full. 

If we could but so divide ourselves as to stay at home 
at the same time, traveling would be one of the greatest 
pleasures, and of the most instructive employments in life. 
As it is, we often lose both ways more than we gain. u. 

Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own 
shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof. u. 

Not a few writers seem to look upon their predecessors as 
Egyptians, whom they have full licence to spoil of their 
jewels ; a permission, by the by, which, the Jews must have 
thought, was not confined to a particular occasion and people, 
but went along with them whithersoever they went, and has 
never quite expired. And as the jewels taken from the 
Egyptians were employed in making the golden calf, which 
the Israelites worshipt as their god, in like manner has it 
sometimes happened, that the poetical plagiary has been so 
dazzled by his own patchwork, as to forget whereof it was 
made, and to set it up as an idol in the temple of his 
self-love. 

When we read that the Israelites, at the sight of the 


v 2 













164 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


calf, which they had seen molten in the wilderness, and the 
materials for which they had themselves supplied, cried out, 
These are thy gods , 0 Israel , that brought thee up out of the 
land of Egypt !—we can hardly repress our indignation at 
such reckless folly. Yet how many are there fully entitled 
to wear the same triple cap ! I do not mean misers merely : 
these are not the sole idolaters of the golden calf nowadays. 
All who worship means, of whatsoever kind, material or 
intellectual,—all, for instance, who think, like the able 
Historian of the War in the Peninsula, that it was wholly by 
the strength and discipline of our armies, and by the skill 
>of our general, that we overthrew the imperial despotism of 
Prance,—all who forget that it is still the Lord of Hosts, 
who breaketh the bow, and knappeth the spear in sunder, 
and burneth the chariots in the fire,—all who are heedless 
of that vox populi, which, when it bursts from the heaving 
depths of a nation’s heart, is in truth vox Dei, —all who take 
no account of that moral power, without which intellectual 
ability dwindles into petty cunning, and the mightiest 
armies, as history has often shewn, become like those armed 
figures in romance, which look formidable at a distance, but 
which fall to pieces at a blow, and display their hollowness, 
—all who conceive that the wellbeing of a people depends 
upon its wealth,—all the doters on steamengines, and 
cottonmills, and spinningjennies, and railroads, on exports 
and imports, on commerce and manufactures,—all who 
dream that mankind may be ennobled and regenerated by 
being taught to read,—all these, and millions more, who are 
besotted by analogous delusions in the lesser circles of 
society, and who fancy that happiness may be attained by 
riches, or by luxury, or by fame, or by learning, or by 
science,—one and all may be numbered among the idolaters 
of the golden calf: one and all cry to their idol, Thou art 
my god ! Thou hast brought us out of the Egypt of darkness 
and misery : thou wilt lead us to the Canaan of light and joy. 
Verily, I would as soon fall down before the golden calf 
itself, as worship the great idol of the day, the great public 
instructor, as it is called, the newspaper press. The calf 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


1G5 


- 


could not even low a lie : and only when the words of the wise 
are written upon it, can paper be worth more than gold. 

And how is it with those who flatter themselves that their 
| own good deeds have brought them out of Egypt? those 
good deeds which God has commanded them to wrest as 
f spoils from the land of Sin. How is it with those w 7 ho 
blindly trust that their good deeds will go before them, and 
lead them to heaven ? Are they not also to be reckoned 
among the worshippers of the golden calf? of an idol, which 
their own hands have wrought and set up ; of an idol, the 
very materials of which would never have been theirs, 
except through God’s command, and the strength His 
command brings with it. Surely, whether it be for the 
past, or the future, we need a better leader than any we can 
either manufacture or mentefacture for ourselves. u. 


One evening, as I was walking by a leafy hedge, a light 
glanced through it across my eyes. At first I tried to fix 
it, but vainly ; till, recollecting that the hedge was the 
medium of sight, instead of peering directly toward the 
spot, I searcht among the leaves for a gap. As soon as I 
found one, I discovered a bright star glimmering on me, 
which I then stood watching at my ease. 

A mystic in my situation would have wearied himself with 
hunting for the light in the place where he caught the first 
glance of it, and would not have got beyond an income 
municable assurance that he had seen a vision from heaven, 
of a nature rather to be dreamt of than described. A 
materialist would have asserted the light to be visible only 
in the gap, because through that alone could it be seen 
distinctly ; and thence would have inferred the light to be 
the gap, or (if more acute and logical than common) at any 
rate to be produced by it. 

I have often thought that the beautiful passage, in which 
our Saviour compares Himself to a Hen gathering her 
chickens under her wings,—and the sublime one in Deutero¬ 
nomy, where Jehovah’s care and guardianship of the Jewish 











166 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


nation is likened to an Eagle stirring up her nest, fluttering 
over her young, spreading abroad her wings, bearing them 
on her wings, and making them ride on the high places of 
the earth,—may be regarded as symbolical of the peculiar 
character of the two dispensations. The earlier was the 
manifestation of the power of God, and shews Him forth in 
His kingly majesty : the latter is the revelation of the love 
of God, full of all gentleness, and household tenderness, and 
more than fatherly or motherly kindness. a. 

It has been deemed a great paradox in Christianity, that 
it makes Humility the avenue to Glory. Yet what other 
avenue is there to Wisdom ? or even to Knowledge ? Would 
you pick up precious truths, you must bend down and look 
for them. Everywhere the pearl of great price lies bedded 
in a shell which has no form or comeliness. It is so in 
physical science. Bacon has declared it : Natura non nisi 
parendo vincitur : and the triumphs of Science since his days 
have proved how willing Nature is to be conquered by those 
w T ho will obey her. It is so in moral speculation. Words¬ 
worth has told us the law of his own mind, the fulfilment of 
which has enabled him to reveal a new world of poetry: 
Wisdom is oft-times nearer when we stoop, Than when we soar. 
That it is so likewise in religion, we are assured by those 
most comfortable words, Except ye become as little children , ye 
shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. 

The same truth is well exprest in the aphorism, which 
Charles the First, when he entered his name on the books 
at Oxford, in 1616, subjoined to it : Si vis omnia subjicere, 
subjice te rationi. Happy would it have been for him, if that 
which flowed thus readily from his pen, had also been graven 
upon his heart! He would not then have had to write it on 
the history of his country with characters more glaring and 
terrible than those of ink. 

Moreover the whole intercourse between man and man 
tnay be seen^-if we look at it closely, to be guided and 
regulated by the same pervading principle : and that it 
ought to be so, is generally recognised, instinctively at least, 





GUESSES AT TRUTH. 167 

if not consciously. As I have often heard said by him, who, 
among all the persons I have converst with to the edification 
of my understanding, had the keenest practical insight into 
human nature, and best knew the art of controlling and 
governing men, and winning them over to their good,—the 
moment anybody is satisfied with himself, everybody else 
becomes dissatisfied with him : whenever a person thinks 
much of himself, all other people cease to think much of 
him. Thus it is not only in the parable, that he who takes 
the highest room, is turned down with shame to the lowest; 
while he who sits down in the lowest room, is bid to go up 
higher. U. 

Strange feelings start up and come forward out of the 
innermost chambers of Memory, when one is employed, after 
the lapse of ten or a dozen years, in revising a work like the 
present, which from its nature must needs be so rich in 
associations of all kinds, so intimately connected with the 
thoughts and feelings and visions and purposes of former 
days, and with the old familiar faces, now hidden from the 
outward eye, the very sight of which was wont to inspire 
joy and confidence and strength. What would be the heart 
of an old weatherbeaten hollow stump, if the leaves and 
blossoms of its youth were suddenly to spring up out of 
the mould around it, and to remind it how bright and 
blissful summer was in the years of its prime ? That which 
has died within us, is often the saddest portion of what 
Death has taken away, sad to all, sad above measure to 
those in whom no higher life has been awakened. The 
heavy thought is the thought of what we were, of what we 
hoped and purpost to have been, of what we ought to have 
been, of what but for ourselves we might have been, set by 
the side of what we are ; as though we were haunted by the 
ghost of our own youth. This is a thought the crushing 
weight of which nothing but a strength above our own can 
jighten. Else if our hearts do but keep fresh, we may 
still love those who are gone, and may still fiAd happiness in 
loving them. 




168 GUESSES AT TRUTH* 

During the last few pages I seem to have been walking 
through a churchyard, strewn with the graves of those 
whom it was my delight to love and revere, of those from 
whom I learnt with what excellent gifts and powers the 
spirit of man is sometimes endowed. The death of India’s 
excellent bishop, Reginald Heber, in whom whatsoever 
things are lovely were found, has already been spoken of. 
Coleridge, who is mentioned along with him, has since fol¬ 
lowed him. The light of his eye also is quencht: none 
shall listen any more to the sweet music of his voice : none 
shall feel their souls teem and burst, as beneath the breath 
of spring, while the lifegiving words of the poet-philosopher 
flow over them* Niebuhr too has past from the earth, 
carrying away a richer treasure of knowledge than was ever 
before lockt up in the breast of a single man. And the 
illustrious friend, to whom I alluded just now,—he who was 
always so kind, always so generous, always so indulgent to 
the weaknesses of others, while he was always endeavouring 
to make them better than they were,—he who was unwearied 
in acts of benevolence, ever aiming at the greatest, but 
never thinking the least below his notice,—who could 
descend, without feeling that he sank, from the command of 
armies and the government of an empire, to become a 
peacemaker in village quarrels,—he in whom dignity was so 
gentle, and wisdom so playful, and whose laurelled head 
was girt with a chaplet of all the domestic affections,—the 
soldier, statesman, patriot, Sir John Malcolm,—he too is 
gathered to his fathers. It is a sorry amends, that death 
allows us to give utterance to that admiration, which, so 
long as its object was living, delicacy commanded us to 
suppress. A better consolation lies in the thought, that, 
blessed as it is to have friends on earth, it is still more 
blessed to have friends in heaven. 

But in truth through the whole of this work I have been 
holding converse with him who was once the partner in it, 
as he was in all my thoughts and feelings, from the earliest 
dawn of both. He too is gone. But is he lost to me ? 0 

no 1 He whose heart was ever pouring forth a stream of 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 169 

love, the parity and inexhaustibleness of which betokened 
its heavenly origin, as he was ever striving to lift me above 
myself, is still at my side, pointing my gaze upward. Only 
the love, which was then hidden within him, has now over¬ 
flowed and transfigured his whole being; and his earthly 
form is turned into that of an angel of light. 

Thou takest not away, 0 Death ! 

Thou strikest; Absence perisheth ; 

Indifference is no more. 

The future brightens on the sight; 

For on the past has fallen a light, 

That tempts us to adore. v* 

1837. 

The Komans used to say of an argument or opinion which 
spreads rapidly, that it takes the popular mind. I should 
rather say, that the popular mind takes the argument or 
opinion. Takes it ? Yes; as one takes infection ; catches 
it, rather, as one catches a fever. For truth, like health, is 
not easily communicated; but diseases and errours are 
contagious. 

This being so, how much to be deplored are democratical 
elements in a constitution ! Not unless the people are the 
head of the State : and I have always fancied them the 
heart; a heart which at times may beat too fast, and 
perhaps feel too warmly ; but which by its pulsations evinces 
and preserves the life and vigour of the social body. 

Of what use are forms, seeing that at times they are 
empty ? Of the same use as barrels, which at times are 
empty too. 

Men of the world hold that it is impossible to do a 
disinterested action, except from an interested motive,—for 
the sake of admiration, if for no grosser, more tangible gain. 
Doubtless they are also convinced, that when the sun is 
showering light from the sky, he is only standing there to 
be stared at. u. 


Everybody is impatient for the time when he shall be his 







170 (HJESSES AT TRUTH. 

own master. And if coming of age were to make one so, if 
years could indeed “ bring the philosophic mind,” it would 
rightly be a day of rejoicing to a whole household and 
neighbourhood. But too often he who is impatient to 
become his own master, when the outward checks are 
removed, merely becomes his own slave, the slave of a 
master in the insolent flush of youth, hasty, headstrong, 
wayward, and tyrannical. Had he really become his own 
master, the first act of his dominion over himself would have 
been to put himself under the dominion of a higher Master 
gLnd a wiser. u. 


By the ancients courage was regarded as practically the 
main part of virtue : by us, though I hope we are not less 
brave, purity is so regarded now. The former is evidently 
the animal excellence, a thing not to be left out when we 
are balancing the one against the other. Still the following 
considerations weigh more with me. Courage, when not an 
instinct, is the creation of society, depending for occasions of 
action (which is essential to it) on outward circumstances, and 
deriving much both of its character and its motives from 
popular opinion and esteem. But purity is inward, secret, 
selfsufficing, harmless, and, to crown all, thoroughly and 
intimately personal. It is indeed a nature, rather than 
a virtue ; and, like other natures, when most perfect, is 
least conscious of itself and its perfection. In a word, 
Courage, however kindled, is fanned by the breath of man : 
Purity lives and derives its life solely from the spirit of 
God. 

The distinction just noticed has also been pointed out by 
Landor, in the Conversation between Leopold and Dupaty. 
“ Effeminacy and wickedness (he makes Leopold say, vol. i. 
p. 62) were correlative terms both in Greek and Latin, as 
were courage and virtue. Among the English, I hear, 
softness and folly, virtue and purity, are synonymous. Let 
others determine on which side lies the indication of the 
more quiet, delicate, and reflecting people.” At the same 
time there is much truth in De Maistre’s remark (Soirees de 





GUESSES AT TRUTH. 171 

St. Petersburg, i. p. 246) : “ Ce fut avec une profonde 
sagesse que les Romains appellerent du meme nom la force 
et la vertu. II n’y a en effet point de vertu proprement 
dite, sans victoire sur nous-memes ; et tout ce qui ne nous 
coflte rien, ne vaut rien.” Though mere bravery was the 
etymological groundwork of the name, moral energy became 
the main element in the idea, and, in its Stoic form, absorbed 
all the rest of it. 


Much has been written of late years about the spiritual 
genius of modem times, as contrasted with the predomi¬ 
nance of the animal and sensuous life in the classical nations 
of antiquity. And no doubt such a distinction exists. 
With the ancients the soul was the vital and motive principle 
of the body : among the moderns the tendency has rather 
been to regard the body as merely the veil or garment of the 
soul. This becomes easily discernible, when, as in the 
Tribune at Florence, we see one of Raphael’s heavenly 
Madonnas beside one of those Venuses in which the Spirit 
of the Earth has put forth all the fascination of its beauty. 
In the latter we look at the limbs; in the former we 
contemplate the feelings. Before the one we might perhaps 
break out into the exclamation of the Bedouin, Blessed be 
God, who has made beautiful women! unless even that 
thought stray too high above the immediate object before 
us. In the other the sight does not pause at the outward 
lineaments, but pierces through to the soul; and we behold 
the meekness of the handmaiden, the purity of the virgin, 
the fervent, humble, adoring love of the mother who sees 
lier God in her Child. 

But when the source of this main difference between the 
two great periods in the history of man has been sought 
after, the seekers have gone far astray. They have 
bewildered themselves in the mazy forest of natural causes, 
w T here, as the old saying has it, one carit see the wood for the 
trees ! One set have talkt about the influence of climate ; 
as if the sky and soil of Italy had undergone some wonderful 
change between the days of Augustus and those when Dante 












172 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

sang and Giotto painted. Others have taken their stand 
among the Northern nations, echoing Montesquieu’s cele¬ 
brated remark, that this fine system was found in the 
woods; as though mead and beer could not intoxicate as 
well as wine; as though Walhalla with its blood and its 
skull-cups were less sensual than the Elysian Islands of the 
Blest. A third party have gone a journey into the East : 
as if it were possible for the human spirit to be more 
imbruted, more bemired by sensuality, than amid the 
voluptuousness and the macerations of Oriental religions. 
The praise is not of man, but of God. It is only by His 
light, that we see light. If we are at all better than those 
first men, who were of the earth, earthy, it is because the 
second Man was the Lord from Heaven. 

Here let me take up the thread of the foregoing remark 
on the two notions concerning the primary constituent of 
virtue. Courage may be considered as purity in outward 
action; purity as courage in the inner man, in the more 
appalling struggles which are waged within our own hearts. 
The ancients, as was to be expected, lookt to the former : 
the moderns have rather fixt their attention on the latter. 
This does not result however, as seems to be hinted in the 
first of the passages quoted above, from our superior 
delicacy and reflexion. At least the same question would 
recur : whence comes this superiority of ours in delicacy and 
reflexion ? The cause is to be found in Christianity, and in 
Christianity alone. Heathen poets and philosophers may 
now and then have caught fleeting glimpses of the principle 
which has wrought this change : but as the foundation of 
all morality, the one paramount maxim, it was first pro¬ 
claimed in the Sermon on the Mount . 

This leads me to notice a further advantage which the 
modern principle has over the ancient; that courage is much 
oftener found without purity ; than purity without courage. 
For although in the physical world one may frequently see 
causes, without their wonted and natural effects, such barren 
causes have no place in the moral world. The concatenation 
there is far more indissoluble, the circulation far more rapid 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


173 


and certain. On the other hand the effect, or something 
like it, is not seldom seen without the cause. Not only is 
there the animal instinct, which impurity does not imme¬ 
diately extinguish; there is also a bastard and ostentatious 
courage, generated and fed by the opinion of the world. 
But they who are pure in heart, they who know what is 
promist to such purity, they who shall see God, what can 
they fear ? 

The chevalier sans, peur was the chevalier sans reproche. It 
is with perfect truth that our moral poet has represented his 
Una as “of nought afraid:” for she was also “pure and 
innocent as that same lamb.” u. 


Truth endues man’s purposes with somewhat of immu¬ 
tability. 

“ Hell (a wise man has said) is paved with good intentions.” 
Pluck up the stones, ye sluggards, and break the devil’s 
head with them. a. 


Pouvoir c’est vouloir. u. 


To refer all pleasures to association is to acknowledge no 
sound but echo. 


Material evil tends to self-annihilation, good to increase. 

Graeculus esuriens in coelum, jusseris, ibit. Alas! the 
command has gone forth to the whole world ; but not even 
the hungry Greek will obey it. u. 

We often live under a cloud; and it is well for us that 
we should do so. Uninterrupted sunshine would parch our 
hearts : we want shade and rain to cool and refresh them. 
Only it behoves us to take care, that, whatever cloud may 
be spread over us, it should be a cloud of witnesses. And 
every cloud may be such, if we can only look through to the 
sunshine that broods behind it. u. 




















174 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

Forms and regularity of proceeding, if they are not 
justice, partake much of the nature of justice, which, in its 
highest sense, is the spirit of distributive order. 

Purity is the feminine, Truth the masculine, of Honour. 

He who wishes to know how a people thrives under & 
groveling aristocracy, should examine how vigorous and thick 
the blades of grass are under a plantain. 

Open evil at all events does this good : it keeps good 
on the alert. When there is no likelihood of an enemy’s 
approaching, the garrison slumber on their post. u. 

The English constitution being continually progressive, 
its perfection consists in its acknowledged imperfection. 

In times of public dissatisfaction add readily, to gratify 
men’s wishes. So the change be made without trepidation, 
there is no contingent danger in the changing. But it is 
difficult to diminish safely, except in times of perfect quiet. 
The first is giving; the last is giving up. It would have, 
been well for England, if her ministers in 1831 had thought 
of this distinction. 


Much of this world’s wisdom is still acquired by necro¬ 
mancy,—by consulting the oracular dead. u. 

Men of principle, from acting independently of instinct, 
when they do wrong, are likely to do great wrong. The 
chains of flesh are not formed of hooks and eyes, to be fas¬ 
tened and loost at will. We are not like the dervise in the 
Eastern story, that, having left our own body to animate 
another, we can return to it when we please. Much less can 
we go on acting a double transmigration between the super¬ 
natural and the natural, wandering to and fro between the 
intellectual and animal states, first unmanning and then 
remanning ourselves, each to serve a turn. Humanity, once 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


175 


put off, is put off for worse, as well as for better. If we take 
not good heed to live angelically afterward, we must count on 
becoming devilish. 

Men are most struck with form and character, women with 
intellect; perhaps I should have said, with attainments. 
But happily, after marriage, sense comes in to make weight 
for us. 


A youth’s love is the more passionate : virgin love is the 
more idolatrous. 


When will talkers refrain from evil-speaking 1 When lis¬ 
teners refrain from evil-hearing. At present there are many 
so credulous of evil, they will receive suspicions and impres¬ 
sions against persons whom they don’t know, from a person 
whom they do know.. in authority to be good for nothing. 

Charity begins at home . This is one of the sayings with 
which Selfishness tries to mask its own deformity. The name 
of Charity is in such repute, to be without it is to be ill 
spoken of. What then can the self-ridden do 1 except per¬ 
vert the name, so that Selfishness may seem to be a branch 
of it. 

The charity which begins at home, is pretty sure to end 
there. It has such ample work within doors, it flags and 
grows faint the moment it gets out of them. We see this 
from what happens in the cases, where even such as reject 
the prior claim in its ordinary sense, are almost all disposed 
to maintain it. Yery few are there, who do not act accord¬ 
ing to the maxim, that Charity begins at home, when it is 
to be shewn to faults or vices, unless indeed they are imagi¬ 
nary or trifling : and few, very few, are truly charitable to 
the failings of others, except those who are severe to their 
own. For indifference is not charity, but the stone which 
the man of the world gives to his neighbour in place of 
bread. u ‘ 








176 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Some persons take reproof goodhumouredly enough, unless 
you are so unlucky as to hit a sore place. Then they wince, 
and writhe, and start up, and knock you down for your 
impertinence, or wish you good morning. u. 

Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris. Such is 
the devil’s hatred of God : and so fiendish is the nature of 
hatred, it is seldom very violent, and never implacable and 
irreconcilable, except when it is unjust and groundless. In 
truth what we hate is the image of our own wrong set before 
us in him whom we have injured : and here as everywhere 
our past sins are the fuel which make our passions bum the 
fierceliest. u. 


We look to our last sickness for repentance, unmindful 
that it is during a recovery men repent, not during a sickness. 
For sickness, by the time we feel it to be such, has its own 
trials, its own selfishness : and to bear the one, and overcome 
the other, is at such a season occupation more than enough 
for any who have not been trained to it by previous discipline 
and practice. 

The same may be said of old age,—perhaps with still more 
justice, since old age has no beginning. 

The feeling is often the deeper truth, the opinion the more 
superficial one. 

I suspect we have internal senses. The mind’s eye, since 
Shakspeare’s time, has been proverbial: and we have also a 
mind’s ear. To say nothing of dreams, one certainly can 
listen to one’s own thoughts, and hear them, or believe that 
one hears them,—the strongest argument adducible in favour 
of our hearing anything. 

Many objects are made venerable by extraneous circum¬ 
stances. The moss, ivy, lichens, and weatherstains on that 
old ruin, picturesque and soothing as they are, formed no 
part in the conception of the architect, nor in the work or 















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


177 


purpose of the builder, but are the subsequent adaptations 
of Time, which with regard to such things is in some sort an 
agent, bringing them under the influences of Nature ? And 
what should follow h Only that, in obeying the perceptions of 
the intellect, and distinguishing logically between accidents 
and properties, we turn not frowardly from the dictates of the 
heart, nor cease to feel, because we have ascertained the 
composite nature of our feelings ; as though it were impos- 
i sible to contemplate the parts in a living whole, and there 
were no other analysis than dissection. Only this; and 
I thankfulness for that which has enabled us so to venerate ; 
and wisdom to preserve the modifying tints, which have 
coloured the object to the tone of our imaginations. 

The difference between those whom the world esteems as 
good, and those whom it condemns as bad, is in many cases 
little else than that the former have been better sheltered 
from temptation, u. 

Political economists tell us that selflove is the bond of 
society. Strange then must be the construction of what is 
called Society, when it is cemented by the strongest and 
most eating of all solvents. For self love not only dissolves 
all harmonious fellowship between man and man, but even 
among the various powers and faculties within the breast of 
the same man; which, when under its sway, can never work 
together, so as to produce an orderly, organical whole. Can 
it be, that Society has been feeding upon poisons, till they 
have become, not merely harmless, but, as this opinion would 
make them, the only wholesome, nourishing diet % u. 

Ghosts never work miracles : nor do they ever come to 
life again. When they appear, it is to beg to be buried, or 
to beg to be revenged; without which they cannot rest. 
Both ways their object is to lie in peace. This should be 
borne in mind by political and philosophical ghostseers, 
ghostlovers, and ghostmongers. The past is past, and must 
pass through the present, not hop over it, into the future, u. 


N 












178 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


What are those teeth for , grandmamma ? said little Red- 
Ridinghood to the Wolf. What are those laws for ? might 
many a simple man ask in like manner of his rulers and 
governors. And in sundry instances, I am afraid, the Wolfs 
answer would not be far from the truth. u. 

It is a mistake to suppose the poet does not know Truth 
by sight quite as well as the philosopher. He must; for he 
is ever seeing her in the mirror of Nature. The difference 
between them is, that the poet is satisfied with worshiping 
her reflected image ; while the philosopher traces her out, 
and follows her to her remote abode between cause and con¬ 
sequence, and there impregnates her. The one loves and 
makes love to Truth; the other esteems and weds her. In 
simpler ages the two things went together ; and then Poetry 
and Philosophy were united. But that universal solvent, 
Civilization, which pulverizes to cement, and splits to fagot, 
has divided them ; and they are now far as the Poles 
asunder. 


The imagination and the feelings have each their truths, 
as well as the reason. The absorption of the three, so as to 
concentrate them in the same point, is one of the univer- 
| salities requisite in a true religion. 

Man’s voluntary works are shadows of objects perceived 
either by his senses or his imagination. The inferiority of 
the copies to their originals in the former class of works is 
evident. Man can no more string dewdrops on a gossamer 
thread, than he can pile up a Mont Blanc, or scoop out an 
ocean. How passing excellent may we then hope to find the 
realities, from which the offspring of his imagination are the 
shadows ! since that offspring, all shadowy as they are, will 
often be fairer than any sensible existence. 


In a mist the hights can for the most part see each other ; 
but the vallies cannot. 



















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


179 


Mountains never shake hands. Their roots may touch: 
they may keep together some way up : but at length they 
part company, and rise into individual, insulated peaks. So 
is it with great men. As mountains mostly run in chains 
and. clusters, crossing the plain at wider or narrower intervals, 
in like manner are there epochs in history when great men 
appear in clusters also. At first too they grow up together, 
seeming to be animated by the same spirit, to have the same 
desires and antipathies, the same purposes and ends. But 
after a while the genius of each begins to know itself, and to 
follow its own bent : they separate and diverge more and 
more : and those who, when young, were working in consort, 
stand alone in their old age. 

But if mountains do not shake hands, neither do they 
kick each other. Their human counterparts unfortunately 
are more pugnacious. Although they break out of the 
throng, and strive to soar in solitary eminence, they cannot 
bear that their neighbours should do the same, but complain 
that they impede the view, and often try to overthrow them, 
especially if they are higher. u. 

Are we really more enlightened than our ancestors ? Or 
is it merely the flaring up of the candle that has burnt down 
to the socket, and is consuming that socket, as a prelude to 
its own extinction ? Such at least has been the character of 
those former ages of the world, which have prided them¬ 
selves on being the most enlightened. u. 


What way of circumventing a man can be so easy and 
suitable as a 'period ? The name should be enough to put us 
on our guard : the experience of every age is not. 

I suspect the soul is never so hampered by its enthralment 
within the body, as when it loves. Pluck the feathers out 
of a bird’s wings ; and, be it ever so young, its youth will 
not save it from suffering by the loss, when instinct urges it 
to attempt flying. Unless indeed there be no such thing as 
instinct ; and flying real kites be, like flying paper kites, a 


N 











180 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

mere matter of education: which reminds me to ask why, 
knowing there are instincts of the body, we are to assume 
there are no instincts of the mind ? To refer whatever we 
should at first sight take for such to the eliciting power of 
circumstances, is idle. Circumstances do indeed call them 
out, at the particular moment when they try their tenden¬ 
cies and strength, but no more create, or rather (since 
creating is out of the question) no more produce them, 
except as pulling the end of a roll of string produces it,— 
that is, produdt or draws it forth ,—than flying is produced 
or given by the need of locomotion. 

To return to the soul: if,—and I believe the fact to be 
undeniable,—human nature, until it has been hardened by 
much exposure to passion, and become used to the public 
eye, is fond of veiling love with silence and concealment, 
while it makes little or no scruple of exhibiting the kindred 
sentiment of friendship ; I see no good way of accounting 
for this, except by referring such shamefastness of the soul 
to its sensitive recoil from a form of affection in which, as 
Nature whispers, its best and purest feelings are combined 
and kneaded up with body. 

The bashfulness which hides affection, from a dread that 
the avowal will be ill received,—the fear of bringing one’s 
judgement in question by what some may deem a misplaced 
choice,—the consciousness that all choice is invidious, from 
involving postponement as well as preference,—all these 
feelings and motives, I am aware, have often considerable 
weight. But they must weigh nearly as much in the case of 
friendship. Friendship indeed may be indulged in boy¬ 
hood, while love is a boon reserved for our maturity ; and 
hence doubtless frequently during youth a fear of being- 
thought presumptuous, if we are discovered fancying our¬ 
selves grown old enough to love. But this can never furnish 
the right key to a reserve, which is neither limited to youth, 
nor directly acted on by time, which varies in different 
countries with their degree of moral cultivation, and in 
individuals appears to proportion its intensity to Jdie depth 
and purity of the heart in which it cowers. 





GUESSES AT TRUTH. 181 

The body, the body is the root of it. But these days of 
adultery are much too delicate to allow of handling the 
subject further. 

Everybody is ready to declare that Cesar’s wife ought to 
be above suspicion; and many, while saying this, will dream 
that Cesar must be of their kin. Yet most people, and 
among them her husband, would be slow to acknowledge, 
what would seem to follow a fortiori , that Cesar himself 
ought to be so too. Or does a splash of mud defile a man 
more than a mortifying ulcer % 

Among the numberless contradictions in our nature, hardly 
any is more glaring than this, between our sensitiveness to 
the slightest disgrace which we fancy cast upon us from 
without, and our callousness to the grossest which we bring 
down on ourselves. In truth they who are the most sensitive 
to the one, are often the most callous to the other. u. 

The wise man will always be able to find an end in the 
means; though bearing in mind at the same time that they 
are means to a higher end. And this is according to God’s 
working, every member of whose universe is at once a part 
and a whole. The unwise man, on the other hand, he whom 
the Psalmist calls the fool, can never see anything but 
means in the end. Doing good is with him the means of 
going to heaven; and going to heaven is the means of 
getting to do nothing. For this is the vulgar notion of 
heaven,—a comfortable sinecure. u. 

What if we live many and various lives 1 each providing 
us its peculiar opportunities of acquiring some new good, 
and casting away the slough of some old evil; so that the 
course of our existence should include a series of lessons, 
and the world be indeed a stage on which every man fills 
many parts. If the doctrine of transmigration has never 
been taught in this form, such is perhaps the idea embodied 
in the fxvOos. 







182 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Impromptus in recluse men are likely to be ct loisir ; and 
presence of mind in thinking men is likely to be recollection. 
Cesar indeed says it is so generally (B. G. v. 33). “ Titurius, 
uti qui nihil ante providisset, trepidare, concursare, cohor- 
tesque disponere; haec tamen ipsa timide, atque ut eum 
omnia deficere viderentur: quod plerumque iis accidere 
consuevit, qui in ipso negotio consilium capere coguntur. 
At Cotta, qui cogitasset haec posse in itinere accidere, . . . 
nulla in re communi saluti deerat.” 

Much to the same purpose is Livy’s explanation of Philo- 
pemen’s readiness in decision, when he suddenly found 
himself in the presence of a hostile force : xxxv. 28. It is 
pleasant to see theoretical and practical intellects thus 
jumping together. 

Napoleon is well said by Tiedge “ to have improvisoed his 
whole life.” He was Fortune’s football, which she kickt 
from throne to throne, until at length by a sudden rebound 
he fell into the middle of the Atlantic. Whereas a truly 
great man’s actions are works of art. Nothing with him is 
extemporized or improvisoed. They involve their con¬ 
sequences, and develope themselves along with the events 
they give birth to. u. 

He must be a thorough fool, who can learn nothing from 
his own folly. u. 

Is not man the only automaton upon earth % The things 
usually called so are in fact heteromatons. u. 

Were nothing else to be learnt from the Rhetoric and 
Ethics of Aristotle, they should be studied by every educated 
Englishman as the best of commentaries on Shakspeare. 


No poet comes near Shakspeare in the number of bosom 
lines,—of lines that we may cherish in our bosoms, and that 
seem almost as if they had grown there,—of lines that, like 
bosom friends, are ever at hand to comfort, counsel, and 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


133 


gladden us, under all the vicissitudes of life,—of lines that, 
according to Bacon’s expression, “ come home to our business 
and bosoms,” and open the door for us to look in, and to see 
what is nestling and brooding there. u. 

How many Englishmen admire Shakspeare ? Doubtless 
all who understand him ; and, it is to be hoped, a few more. 
For how many Englishmen understand Shakspeare? Were 
Diogenes to set out on his search through the land, I trust 
he would bring home many hundreds, not to say thousands, 
for every one I should put up. To judge from what has 
been written about him, the Englishmen who understand 
Shakspeare, are little more numerous than those who under¬ 
stand the language spoken in Paradise. You will now and 
then meet with ingenious remarks on particular passages, 
and even on particular characters, or rather on particular 
features in them. But these remarks are mostly as incom¬ 
plete and unsatisfactory, as the description of a hand or foot 
would be, unless viewed with reference to the whole body. 
He who wishes to trace the march and to scan the operations 
of this most marvellous genius, and to discern the mysterious 
organization of his wonderful works, will find little help but 
what comes from beyond the German Ocean. 

It is scarcely worth while asking the third question : 
Would Shakspeare have chosen rather to be admired, or to 
be understood ? Not however that any one could under¬ 
stand without admiring, though many may admire without 
understanding him. Birds are fond of cherries, yet know 
little about vegetable physiology. 

Some years ago indeed there seemed to be ground for 
hoping that the want here spoken of might be supplied by 
the publication of Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakspeare. Foi 
though Coleridge, as he himself says of Warburton, is often 
hindered from seeing the thoughts of others by “ the mist- 
working swarm,” or rather by the radiant flood of his own, 
though often, like the sun, when looking at the planets, he 
only beholds his own image in the objects of his gaze, and 
often, when his eye darts on a cloud, will turn it into a rain- 











134 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


bow,—yet he had a livelier perception, than any other 
Englishman, of the two cardinal ideas of all criticism,—that 
every work of genius is at once an organic whole in itself, 
and the part and member of a living, organic universe, of 
that poetical world in which the spirit of man manifests 
itself by successive avatars. These, the two main ideas 
which have been brought to light and unfolded by the philo¬ 
sophical criticism of Germany since the days of Winckelmann 
and Lessing, he united with that moral, political, and 
practical discernment, which are the highest endowments of 
the English mind, and which give our great writers a dignity 
almost unparalleled elsewhere, from their ever-w r akeful con¬ 
sciousness that man is a moral, as well as a sentient and 
percipient and thinking and knowing being, and that his 
relations as a moral being are of all the most momentous 
and the highest. Coleridge’s own imagination too enabled 
him to accompany all other poets in them boldest flights, 
and then to feel most truly in his element. Nor could 
anything be too profound or too subtile for his psychological 
analysis. In fact his chief failing as a critic was his fondness 
for seeking depth below depth, and knot within knot : and 
he would now and then try to dive, when the water did not 
come up to his ancles. 

Above all, for understanding Shakspeare, Coleridge had 
the two powers, which are scarcely less mighty in our 
intellectual than in our moral and spiritual life, Faith and 
Love,—a boundless faith in Shakspeare’s truth, and a love 
for him, akin to that with which philosophers study the 
works of Nature, shrinking from no labour for the sake of 
getting at a satisfactory solution, and always distrusting 
themselves until they have found one, in a firm confidence 
that Wisdom will infallibly be justified by her children. It 
is quite touching to see how humbly this great thinker and 
poet hints his doubts, when the propriety of any passage in 
Shakspeare appears questionable to his understanding : and 
most cheering is it to read his assurance, that “ in many 
instances he has ripened into a perception of beauties, where 
he had before descried faults; ” and that throughout his life, 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


135 


“ at eyery new accession of information, after every successful 
exercise of meditation, and every fresh presentation of 
experience, he had unfailingly discovered a proportionate 
increase of wisdom and intuition in Shakspeare.” See his 
Literary Remains, Yol. ii. pp. 52, 115, 139. The same truth 
is enforced by Mr De Quincey in his admirable remarks on 
the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth. 

In the study of poetry, as in yet higher studies, it is often 
necessary that we should believe, before we can understand : 
and through the energy, patience, and perseverance, which 
Faith alone can inspire, do we mount to the understanding 
of what we have already believed in. How, for instance, 
should we ever have discerned the excellences of the Greek 
drama, without a previous faith in its excellence, strong 
enough not to shrink from the manifold difficulties which 
would else have repelled us ? Who would be at the trouble 
of cracking a nut, if he did not believe there was a kernel 
within it ? A study pursued in this spirit of faith is sure of 
being continually rewarded by new influxes of knowledge, 
not only on account of the spring which such a spirit gives 
to our faculties, but also because it delivers them from most 
of the prejudices, which make our minds the thralls of the 
present. Common men, on the other hand, are prone to look 
down on whatever passes their comprehension, thus betraying 
the natural affinity between ignorance and contempt. 

Unfortunately Coleridge’s Lectures are among the trea¬ 
sures which the waves of forgetfulness have swallowed up. 
Precious fragments of them however have been preserved; 
and these, like almost all his writings, are rich in thoughts 
fitted to awaken reflexion, and to guide it. And that there 
are writers amongst us, who understand Shakspeare, and 
might teach others to understand him, is proved by the 
remarks on Macbeth just referred to, as well as by the very 
acute and judicious Observations on Shakspeares Romeo as 
compared with the Romeo acted on the Stage. Much delicacy 
of observation too and elegance of taste is shewn in the 
Characteristics of Shakspeare’s Women,—one of the happiest 
subjects on which a female pen was ever employed. u. 








186 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


“ The German writers (Coleridge is reported to have said) 
have acquired an elegance of thought and of mind, just as 
we have attained a style and smartness of composition : so 
that, if you were to read an ordinary German author as an 
English one, you would say, This man has something in him ; 
this man thinks : whereas it is merely a method acquired by 
them, as we have acquired a style.” Letters and Conversa¬ 
tions of S. T. C. Vol ii. p. 4. 

Such pieces of tabletalk are not legitimate objects of 
criticism; because we can never feel sure how far the report 
is an accurate one, or how far the opinion uttered may have 
been modified, either expressly by words, or implicitly by 
the occasion which prompted it. What is here said is quite 
true, provided it be not understood disparagingly. The 
peculiar value of modern German literature does not arise, 
except in a few instances, from the superior genius of the 
writers, so much as from their being better trained and 
disciplined in the principles and method of knowledge. For 
this advantage they are indebted to their philosophical 
education. Fifty years ago the common run of German 
writers were as superficial and immethodical as those of the 
rest of Europe. The love of system, which has always 
characterized the nation, only prevented any gleam of light 
from breaking through the clouds of dulness in which they 
wrapt themselves. But now, as in most of the better 
writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we may 
discern the influence of the scholastic logic, in which they 
were trained, so one can hardly look into a German work of 
the present century, on whatever subject of enquiry, without 
perceiving that it is written by a countryman of Kant and 
Fichte and Schelling. And surely this is the highest reward 
which can fall to the lot of any human intellect, to be thus 
diffused through and amalgamated with the intellect of a 
whole people, to live in their minds, not merely when they 
are thinking of you, and talking of you, but even when they 
are totally unconscious of your personal existence. 

Nay, what but this is the ground of the superiority of 
civilized nations to savages 1 Their minds are better 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


187 


moulded and disciplined, more or less, by the various 
processes of education. In fact training, if it does not 
impart strength, fosters and increases it, and renders it service¬ 
able, and prevents its running waste : so that, assuming the 
quantity of ability allotted by Nature to two nations to be 
the same, that which has the better system of moral and 
intellectual culture, will bring up the greater number of 
able men. 

It is true, the forms of philosophical thought, when 
generally prevalent, so as to become fashionable in a 
literature, will be used by many without discernment of 
their value and power. Many will fancy that the possession 
of a few phrases is enough to open the gates of all knowledge 
to them, and to carry them at once beyond the wisdom of 
former ages, without any necessity for personal research or 
meditation : and imbecility, selfcomplacently mouthing big 
phrases, is more than usually offensive. Perhaps too it is 
impossible to devise any scheme of education, which can be 
reckoned upon for promoting the development of poetical 
genius. This is implied in the saying, Poeta nascitur, non 
fit. Nor is genius in philosophy, or in art, though more 
dependent on foregoing circumstances than in poetry, to be 
elicited with certainty by any system. But for the talents 
employed in the various enquiries of philology and science, a 
great deal may be done by appropriate stimulants and 
instruction, by putting them in the right way, and setting 
before them the mark they are to aim at. Hence, when¬ 
ever a man of genius plants a colony in an unexplored region 
of thought, he finds followers ready to join him in effecting 
what his own unassisted arm could only partially have 
accomplisht : and though stray pieces o'f ore may be pickt 
up without exciting much notice, if a mine of truth has 
once been successfully opened, it is mostly workt on until it 
is exhausted. 

Soon after reading the remark of Coleridge’s just cited, I 
happened to open a German periodical work containing a 
dissertation on the Amphitryon of Plautus. That play, the 
writer observes, differs from all the other Roman comedies in 



183 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Laving a mythological subject, which occasions essential 
differences in its treatment; so that it forms a distinct 
species : and he proposes to examine the nature of this 
peculiar form of comedy, according to its external and 
internal character; not to explain the poetical composition 
of the Amphitryon , considered as an individual work of art, 
but merely to determine the place it is to hold in the history 
of the Roman drama. Now this, which is exactly the plan 
any intelligent German writer would have taken in treating 
the same subject, may exemplify the quality in German 
literature spoken of by Coleridge. Here too one should say, 
This man knows what he is talking about: and one should say 
so with good reason. For in criticism, as in every other 
branch of knowledge, prudens quaestio dimidium sdentiae est. 

He who has got the clue, may thread the maze. Yet the 
method of investigation here is totally different from what 
an English scholar would have pursued. The notion of 
| regarding the Amphitryon as a distinct species of ancient 
comedy, and of considering that species in its relation to the 
rest of the Roman drama,—the distinction drawn between 
this historial view of it, and the esthetical analysis of it 
taken by itself,—these are thoughts which would never have 
entered the head of an English critic, unless he had been 
inoculated with them either directly or indirectly from 
Germany. Deluged as we are with criticism in every shape, 
quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily,—many thousands of 
pages as are written on criticism in England every year,— 
we hardly ever find the glimmering of a suspicion that there 
is anything essential in the form of a poem, or that there 
are any principles and laws to determine it, or that a poet 
has anything to do, except to get an interesting story, and 
to describe interesting characters, and to deck out his 
pages with as many fine thoughts and pretty images as he 
can muster. No wonder that our criticism is so worthless 
and unprofitable ! that it is of no manner of use, either in 
teaching our writers how to write, or our readers how to 
read! 

Let me allude to another instance. Works containing 

O I 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


189 


criticisms on all Shakspeare’s plays have been publisht of 
late years, by Hazlitt in England, and by Francis Horn in 
Germany. Nobody can doubt that Hazlitt by nature had 
the acuter and stronger understanding of the two: he had 
cultivated it by metaphysical studies : he had a passionate 
love for poetry, and yielded to no man in his admiration for 
Shakspeare. By his early intercourse with Coleridge too he 
had been led to perceive more clearly than most Englishmen, 
that poetry is not an arbitrary and chanceful thing, that it 
has a reason of its own, and that, when genuine, it springs 
from a vital idea, which is at once constitutive and regula¬ 
tive, and which manifests itself not in a technical apparatus, 
but in the free symmetry of a living form. Yet, from the 
want of a proper intellectual discipline and method, his 
perception of this truth never became an intuition, nor 
coalesced with the rest of his knowledge : and owing to this 
want, and no doubt to that woful deficiency of moral disci¬ 
pline and principle, through which his talents went to rack, 
Hazlitt’s work on Shakspeare, though often clever and 
sparkling, and sometimes ingenious in pointing out latent 
beauties in particular passages, is vastly inferior to Horn’s as 
an analytical exposition of the principles and structure of 
Shakspeare’s plays, tracing and elucidating the hidden, 
labyrinthine workings of his all-vivifying, all-unifying 
genius. u - 

When a subtile critic has detected some recondite beauty 
in Shakspeare, the vulgar are fain to cry that Shakspeare 
did not mean it. Well! what of that ? If it be there, his 
genius meant it. This is the very mark whereby to know a 
true poet. There will always be a number of beauties in his 
works, which he never meant to put into them. 

This is one of the resemblances between the works of 
Genius and those of Nature, a resemblance betokening that 
the powers which produce them are akin. Each, beside its 
immediate, apparent purpose, is ever connected by certain 
delicate and almost imperceptible fibres, by numberless ties 
of union and communion, and the sweet intercourse of giving 








190 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


and receiving, with the universe of which it forms a part. 
Hereby the poet shews that he is not a mere “ child of Time, 
But offspring of the Eternal Prime.” His works are not 
narrowed to the climes and seasons, the manners and 
thoughts that give birth to them, but spread out their 
invisible arms through time and space, and, when genera¬ 
tions, and empires, and even religions have past away, still 
stand in unwaning freshness and truth. They have a living 
assimilative power. As man changes, they disclose new 
features and aspects, and ever look him in the face with the 
reflexion of his own image, and speak to him with the voice 
of his own heart; so that after thousands of years we still 
welcome them as we would a brother. 

This too is the great analogy between Genius and Good¬ 
ness, that, unconscious of its own excellences, it works, not 
so much by an intelligent, reflective, prospective impulse of 
the will, as by the prompting of a higher spirit, breathing in 
it and through it, coming one knows not whence, and going 
one knows not whither; under the sway of which spirit, 
whenever it lifts up its head and shakes its locks, it scatters 
light and splendour around. The question therefore, 
■whether a great poet meant such a particular beauty, comes 
to much the same thing as the question, whether the sun 
means that his light should enter into such or such a flower. 
He who works in unison with Nature and Truth, is sure to 
be far mightier and wiser than himself. u. 

The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a 
faculty the less ? ora sense the more ? 

Some hearts are like a melting peach, but with a larger, 
coarser, harder stone. 


I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a 
popular election. 


Almost every rational man can shew nearly the same 
number of moral virtues. Only in the good man the active 















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


191 


and beneficent virtues look outward, the passive and 
parsimonious inward. In the bad man it is just the con¬ 
trary. His forethought, his generosity, his longsuffering is 
for himself; his severity and temperance and frugality are 
for others. But the religious virtues belong solely to the 
religious. God hides Himself from the wicked : or at least 
the wicked blinds himself to God. If he practically acknow¬ 
ledge any, which is only now and then, it is one whose non¬ 
existence is certain, whose fabulousness is evident to him . . 
the Devil. 


We like slipping, but not falling : our real desire is to be 
tempted enough. 

The man who will share his wealth with a woman, has 
some love for her: the man who can resolve to share his 
poverty with her, has more . . of course supposing him to 
be a man, not a child, or a beast. 

Our statequacks of late years have thought fit to style 
themselves Radical Reformers : and though the title involves 
an absurdity, it is not on that account less fitted for the 
sages who have assumed it; many of whom moreover may 
have no very clear notion what the epithet they give them¬ 
selves means. For what can a Radical Reformer be ? Is he 
a Reformer of the roots of things? But Nature buries 
these out of sight, and will not allow man to tamper with 
them, assigning him the task of training and pruning the 
stem and branches. Or is a Radical Reformer one who tears 
up a tree by the roots, and reforms it by laying it prostrate 1 
If so, our Reformers may indeed put in a claim to the title, 
and might fairly contest it with the hurricane of last autumn. 
But what can be the good or comfort of a reformation, which 
is only another name for destruction 1 

The word may perhaps be borrowed from medicine, in 
which we speak of a radical care. This however is a 
metaphor implying the extirpation, or complete uprooting of 
the disease, after which the sanative pow r ers of Nature will 
















192 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


restore the constitution to health. But there is no such 
sanative power in a state; where the mere removal of abuses 
does not avail to set any vital faculties in action. In truth 
this is only another form of the errour, by which man, ever 
quicker at destroying than at producing, has confounded re¬ 
pentance with reformation, /zera/xe'Xeia with geravoia. Whereas 
the true Reformer is he who creates new institutions, and 
gives them life and energy, and trusts to them for throwing 
off such evil humours as may be lying in the body politic. 
The true Reformer is the Seminal Reformer, not the Radical. 
And this is the way the Sower, who went forth to sow His 
seed, did really reform the world, without making any open 
assault to uproot what was already existing. 1837. u. 

A writer, for whom I have a high esteem, in the Politics 
for the People (p. 222), objects to the foregoing remarks on 
the name Radical, and asserts that “ there can be no Seminal 
Reform, without Radical Reform first, where Reform is 
needed at all. Is the wheat (he asks) sown amidst the 
stubble, or on the rush-grown meadow, or on the common 
covered with heather and gorse *1 Must not the stem 
ploughshare first be driven through the soil, rooting up, 
right and left, all evil growths of the past, all good growths 
grown useless! Was He not the greatest of Radical Re¬ 
formers, of whose work it was said, And now also the axe is 
laid to the root of the trees; therefore every one that bringeth 
not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire. Since 
the first day when the ground was curst for man’s sake, and 
made to bring forth thorns and thistles, it has been every 
true man’s lot and duty to be a Radical Reformer, whether 
on a small scale or a large. But such Radical Reform is 
indeed only a means towards Seminal Reform : the weeds 
are only pluckt up, that the good seed may be put in ; and 
that seed every true man is bound to be throwing in as 
perpetually, as he is perpetually rooting out the weeds. It 
is not the Radical Reformer who is the Destructive ; it is 
the blind Conservative, who looks upon the thorns and 
thistles as holy, instead of feeling that they are God’s curse.’ 1 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


193 


In reply to these objections, I will merely point out a 
couple of fallacies, as they seem to me, contained in them. 

The first is, that the analogy between agriculture and 
state-culture is pusht far beyond its due limits. The vege¬ 
table crop, as it has no living soul, no permanent being,—as 
it has a merely transient purpose, external to itself,—is 
swept away at the end of the harvest, when that purpose is 
fulfilled. But no Reformer, however Radical, not even 
Robespierre, has ventured to lay down that the generations 
of mankind are to be swept away one after another, in order 
to make room for their successors. The chain of the human 
race does not consist of & number of distinct, annual links : 
each annual link combines the produce of a century; and 
all these run one into the other. So too do their habits ; so 
do their institutions, social and political. There is no new 
beginning in the history of the world : or, if there is one 
new era, it was introduced by a superhuman Author ; and 
even that stretches back through the whole of anterior 
history. The French Republicans did indeed attempt to 
establish a new era: but the builders of Babel were not 
more signally confounded, than they by the powers which 
they evoked from hell. The inherent vitality of the nation, 
after a while, prevailed over the destroyer, not however 
without incalculable misery at the time, and grievous 
deterioration to the moral character of the people. Hence 
I cannot see in what sense we can speak of “ driving the 
stern ploughshare ” through the social life and institutions 
of a nation. He who does not know that a nation has a 
living, permanent being, and that its organic institutions are 
intimately connected with that permanent life,—he who feels 
no reverence for that being, and the institutions connected 
with it,—he who worships his own notions above them, and 
would set up his own fancies in their stead,—is sadly lacking 
in that spirit, which is the primary element in the character 
of a wise and practical Reformer. 

In the next place it seems to me a total mistake, to apply 
the words of the Baptist ,—And now the axe is laid to the root 
of the tree , &c.—to any work ordained for man. When the 


o 









194 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


appointed time comes, God does indeed shew forth His 
justice by sweeping away that which is utterly corrupt. As 
He swept away the cities of the plain, so, when her cup was 
full, did He sweep away Jerusalem. Yet even the Son of 
God, in His human manifestation, came not to destroy, but 
to save. He would have gathered Jerusalem under His 
wings ; but she would not: therefore was her house left 
desolate. Assuredly too this is the only part of His office* 
which we are called to discharge. As His ministers, we are 
to be ministers of salvation, not of destruction. The evil in 
ourselves indeed we are to pluck up, branch and root : but 
in our dealings with others, unless we have a special office 
committed to us by the laws of family or national life, ouir 
task will mainly be to contend against evil by sowing the 
seeds of good, not by Radical Reform, but by Seminal. The 
satirist, the rhetorician, the moralist, will indeed try the 
former, and will therefore fail. The Christian has a higher 
power entrusted to him, the power of God’s goodness and 
mercy,—the Gospel of redemption and salvation,—not the 
woes of the Trojan prophetess, who could gain no credence, 
but the glad tidings of the Kingdom of Heaven : and if he 
relies on this one power, he will succeed, where others must 
needs fail. For Earth cannot overpower Hell; but Heaven 
can. Elijah, under the old Dispensation, might be com¬ 
missioned to destroy the worship of Baal by the sword : such 
destruction however is ineffectual, transitory : that which 
has been destroyed sprouts up again : for the roots dive 
beyond the reach of the hoe and pickaxe, even into the 
depths of the heart. Hence you must sow the seed, which 
will change, and, as it were, leaven the heart, so that the 
heart itself will cast them out convulsively. 

This was what our Lord Himself did. Though the 
Jewish nation was doomed to perish, every act of His life 
was designed to save the Jews, if they would accept His 
salvation. Nor did the Apostles go forth to destroy the 
idols and idolatries of the nations. In so doing they would 
have forsaken Christ’s way, and would have anticipated 
Mahomet’s. They preacht Christ and the Resurrection,— 


J 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


195 


Christ crucified, the power of God unto salvation; and 
hereby they overthrew the idolatries and superstitions of 
the nations, not transitorily, but permanently. So again at 
the Reformation, Luther, having the true Apostolical spirit 
in him, the spirit of a Seminal, not of a Radical Reformer, 
was ever strenuous in resisting all attempts to cany out the 
Reformation by destructive, revolutionary, radical measures. 
Preach the word of God , he said ,—‘preach the truth ; and the 
truth will set us free. The shooting of the new leaves will 
push off the old ones, far more effectually than the winds 
can tear them off. And the former is the human, Christian 
procedure : the latter is committed to the blind powers of 
Nature, though man, acting under the sway of his passions, 
may at times become their instrument. 

These same principles will also regulate the conduct of the 
true Christian statesman. Like Luther, he will be very 
slow and reluctant to destroy any ancient institution, 
knowing that the temporary evils which may arise from its 
perversion, are caused, not by the institution itself, but by 
the heart and will of those who pervert it, and that this 
heart and will would in no degree be corrected by its de¬ 
struction. He will indeed find frequent occasion for lopping 
and pruning off morbid outgrowths and overgrowths, as well 
as for training the healthy growths of each successive year : 
but he will remember that this is his business, to prune off, 
not to cut down. The sophists of the last century, and at 
the beginning of the present, forgot this : nor is it suffi¬ 
ciently borne in mind now. They forgot that a nation has 
a living, organic growth, which manifests itself in its con¬ 
stitution, and in its various institutions : they regarded it 
rather as a machine, which they might take to pieces, and 
reconstruct at will, this way or that. These notions, which 
are refuted by the teaching of all the greatest political phi¬ 
losophers, above all of Burke,—and which have been still 
more signally refuted by the cracking and breaking up of all 
such manufactured constitutions,—are so likewise by the two 
great witnesses that the history of the world brings forward, 

i to shew the wisdom and permanence of organic constitutions, 

i__ 

o 2 












196 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


expanding and developing themselves along with the growth 
of the nation, and continuing the same, even as man is the 
same in manhood and old age as in childhood, notwith¬ 
standing the innumerable accretions which he has been 
continually assimilating and incorporating .with himself. 
These two great witnesses are Rome and England. Both 
indeed had to pass through divers critical trials, when the 
wilfulness and selfishness of man tried to suspend and arrest 
the organic development of the Constitution ; and Rome at 
last perisht, when that development seemed to have become 
a practical impossibility. But each is the witness for true 
political wisdom, Rome in the ancient world, England in the 
modern. 1851. u. 

Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For 
Nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is 
the work of man, under the guidance and inspiration of a 
mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man, in the 
imbecility of his mimic understanding. u. 

What is the use of it ? is the first question askt in England 
by almost everybody about almost everything. When 
foreiners, who have learnt English from our older writers, 
come amongst us, hearing such frequent enquiries after use, 
they must fancy they have fallen among a set of usurers. 
No wonder so many of them have applied for loans. The 
only wonder, as we are not usurers, is how they got them. 

Still there are a few things, a husband for one’s daughter, 
a Rubens, four horses, a cure of souls,—the use of which is 
never askt : probably because it is so evident. In those 
cases the first question, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, 
is, What are they worth ? The worth of a cure of souls ! 0 

miserable money-loving people ! whose very language is pro¬ 
stituted to avarice. Wealth is money : Fortune is money : 
Worth is money : and, had not God for once been beforehand 
with the world, Providence would have been money too. 
The worth of a cure of souls is Heaven or Hell, according as 
Jie who is appointed to it does his duty or neglects it. 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 197 

You want to double your riches, and without gambling or 
stockjobbing. Share it. Whether it be material or intel¬ 
lectual, its rapid increase will amaze you. What would the 
sun have been, had he folded himself up in darkness ? Surely 
he would have gone out. So would Socrates. 

This road to wealth seems to have been discovered some 
three thousand years ago. At least it was known to Hesiod, 
and has been recommended by him in the one precious line 
he has left us. But even he complains of the fools, who did 
not know that half is more than the whole. And ever since, 
though mankind have always been in full chase after riches, 
though they have not feared to follow Columbus and Gama 
in chase of it, though they have waded through blood, and 
crept through falsehood, and trampled on their own hearts, 
and been ready to ride on a broomstick, in chase of it, very 
few have ever taken this road, albeit the easiest, the shortest, 
and the surest. u. 


One of the first things a soldier has to do, is to harden 
himself against heat and cold. He must enure himself to 
bear sudden and violent changes. In like manner they who 
enter into public life should begin by dulling their sensitive¬ 
ness to praise and blame. He who cannot turn his back on 
the one, and face the other, will probably be beguiled by his 
favorite, into letting his enemy come behind him, and wound 
him when off his guard. Let him keep a firm footing, and 
beware of being lifted up, remembering that this is the com¬ 
monest trick by which wrestlers throw their antagonists, tr. 

Gratification is distinct from happiness in the common 
apprehension of mankind ; and so is selfishness from wisdom. 
But passion in its blindness disregards, or rather speaks as if 
it disregarded, the first distinction; and sophists, taking- 
advantage of this, confound the last. Their confusion how¬ 
ever is worse confounded. For it is not every gratification 
that is selfish, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, which 
implies blame and sin; but such only as is undue or in¬ 
ordinate, whether in kind or degree. Never was a man 











198 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


called selfish for quenching his thirst with water, where water 
was not scarce; many a man has been justly, for drinking 
Champagne. The argument then, if unraveled into a syl¬ 
logism, would hang together thus : 

Some gratifications are selfish : 

No gratification is happiness : 
therefore, 

All happiness is selfish. 

I am not surprised that these gentlemen speak ill of logic. 

Misers are the greatest spendthrifts : and spendthrifts often 
end in becoming the greatest misers. U. 

The principle gives birth to the rule : the motive may 
justify the exception. 

When the Parisians set up a naked prostitute as the 
goddess of Reason, they can hardly have been aware what an 
apt type she afforded of their Reason, and indeed of all 
Reason,—if that divine name be not forfeited by such a 
traitorous act,—which turns away its face from heaven, and 
throws off its allegiance to the truth as it is in God. When 
Reason has done this, it is stark naked, and ready to prosti¬ 
tute itself to every capricious lust, whether of the flesh, or of 
the spirit. One can never repeat too often, that Reason, as 
it exists in man, is only our intellectual eye, and that, like 
the eye, to see, it needs light,—to see clearly and far, it needs 
the light of heaven. u. 

Entireness, illimitableness is indispensable to Faith. What 
we believe, we must believe wholly and without reserve ; 
wherefore the only perfect and satisfying object of Faith is 
God. A Faith that sets bounds to itself, that will believe so 
much and no more, that will trust thus far and no further, 
is none. It is only Doubt taking a nap in an elbow chair. 
The husband, whose scepticism is prurient enough to con¬ 
template the possibility of his wife’s proving false, richly 
deserves that she should do so. u. 

I- - ' _ 

















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


199 


Never put much confidence in such as put no confidence in 
others. A man prone to suspect evil is mostly looking in 
his neighbour for what he sees in himself. As to the pure 
all things are pure, even so to the impure all things are 
impure. U. 

Do you wish to find out a person’s weak points 1 Note 
the failings he has the quickest eye for in others. They may 
not be the very failings he is himself conscious of; but they 
will be their next-door neighbours. No man keeps such a 
jealous look-out as a rival. u. 

In reading the Apostolical Epistles, we should bear in 
mind that they are not scientific treatises, armed at all points 
against carpers and misconceivers, but occasional letters, 
addrest to disciples, who, as the writer knew, were both able 
and inclined to make due allowance for the latitude of 
epistolary expression. 

But is not this what the Socinians contend for ? 

If it were, I should have nothing to say against them. 
What I object to in them is their making, not due allow¬ 
ances, but undue, — allowances discountenanced by the 
plainest passages as well as the uniform tenour of the Sacred 
Writings, by the whole analogy, and, so far as we dare judge 
of them, the prompting principles of Revelation. 

But how shall we discern the due from the undue 1 

As we discern everything else : by the honest use of a 
cultivated understanding. If we have not banisht the Holy 
Spirit by slights and excesses, if we have fed His lamp in our 
hearts with prayer, if we have improved and strengthened 
our faculties by education and exercise, and then sit down to 
Study the Bible with enquiring and teachable minds, we need 
not doubt of discovering its meaning ; not indeed purely,— 
for where find an intellect so colourless as never to tinge the 
light that falls upon it ? not wholly,—for how fathom the 
ocean of God’s word 1 but with such accuracy, and in such 
degree, as shall suffice for the uses of our spiritual life. If 
we have neglected this previous discipline, if we take up the 









200' GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

book with stupid or ignorant, lazy or negligent, arrogant or 
unclean and do-no-good hands, we shall in running through 
its pages stumble on many things dark and startling, on 
many things which, aggravated by presumptuous heedless- 
ness, might prove destructively offensive. 

What then are the poor to do 1 

They must avail themselves of oral instruction, have 
I recourse, so far as may be, to written helps, and follow the 
guidance of God’s ministers. But suitable faculties seem 
indispensable. Let a man be ever so pious and sincere, if 
blind, he could not see the book, nor, if unlettered, read it,, 
nor, if ignorant of English, know the meaning of the words, 
nor, if half-witted, comprehend the sentences. Why suppose 
that the intellectual hindrances to mastering the book end 
here h especially when we allow the existence of moral hin¬ 
drances, and are aware that they combine with the intel¬ 
lectual in unascertainable and indefinite proportions; if they 
do not rather form their essence, or at least their germ. 
You grant that carelessness and impatience may hide the 
meaning of the book from us : you should be sure that 
stupidity does not spring from carelessness, nor bad logic 
from impatience, before you decide so confidently that 
stupidity and bad logic cannot. 

Search the Scriptures, said Christ. “Non dixit legite, sed 
scrutamini (as Chrysostom, quoted by Jeremy Taylor, On the 
Minister's Duty, Serm. II. Yol. vi. p. 520, observes on this 
text), quia oportet profundius effodere, ut quae alte delites- 
cant invenire possimus. The Jews have a saying : qui non 
advertit quod supra et infra in scriptoribus legitur, is pervertit 
verba Dei viventis. He that will understand God’s meaning, 
must look above, and below, and round about.” Now to look 
at things below the surface, we must dig down to them. They 
who omit this, from whatever cause, be it the sluggishness 
of their will, or merely the bluntness of their instrument,—* 
for this question, though important in judging of the work¬ 
man, cannot affect the accomplishment of the work,—will 
never gain the buried treasure. Those on the other hand 
who dig as they are taught to do, will reach it in time, if 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 201 

they faint not. The number of demi-semi-Christians in the 
world no more establishes the contrary, than the number 
of drunkards in the world establishes the impossibility of 
; keeping sober. 

But, as Taylor remarks in the same Sermon (p. 509), 
“ though many precious things are reserved for them who 
dig deep and search wisely, medicinal plants, and corn, and 
grass, things fit for food and physic, are to be had in every 
field.” The great duties of a Christian are so plainly exprest, 
that they who run may read, and that all who listen may 
understand them : expounders of doctrine are appointed by 
| the Church : and in every case, to every one who truly 
! seeks, sufficient will be given for his salvation. 

How deeply rooted must unbelief be in our hearts, when 
we are surprised to find our prayers answered ! instead of 
feeling sure that they will be so, if they are only offered up 
in faith, and are in accord with the will of God. a . 

Moses, when the battle was raging, held up his arms to 
heaven, with the rod of God in his hand ; and thus Israel 
overcame Amalek. Hence a notion got abroad through the 
world, that in times of difficulty or danger the mightiest 
weapon man can make use of is prayer. But Moses felt his 
arms grow heavy; and he was forced to call in Aaron and 
Hur to hold them up. In like manner do we all too readily 
weary of prayer, and feel it become a burthen, and let our 
hands drop ; and then Amalek prevails. 

Here however the wisdom of the eighteenth century has 
devised a substitute, at least for one of the cases in which 
our ancestors used to hold up their arms to heaven. Franklin 
has taught us to hold up iron bars to heaven, which have 
the advantage of never growing weary, and under the guard 
of which we may feel sure that the storm will pass over 
without harming us. Besides they allow us to employ our 
hands to better purpose, in working, or eating, or fighting. 

Still there are sundry kinds of dangers, from which 
Franklin’s conductors will not secure us : and against these > 













202 ;gtjesses at truth. 

till the time when matter shall have utterly choked and 
stifled spirit, we still need the help of prayer. And as our 
flesh is so weak, that our prayers soon droop and become 
faint, unless they are upheld, Christ and the Holy Spirit 
vouchsafe to uphold our prayers, and to breathe the power of 
faith into them, so that they may mount heavenward, and 
to bear them up to the very Throne of Grace. u. 

All Religions,—for absolute Pantheism is none,—must of 
necessity be anthropomorphic. The idea of God must be 
adapted to the capacities of the human imagination. Chris¬ 
tianity differs from all other Religions in this, that its 
anthropomorphism is theopneustic. u. 

A weak mind sinks under prosperity, as well as under 
adversity. A strong and deep mind has two highest 
tides,—when the moon is at the full, and when there is no 
moon. * u. 


What a pity it is that there are so many words ! When¬ 
ever one wants to say anything, three or four ways of saying 
it run into one’s head together ; and one can’t tell which to 
choose. It is as troublesome and puzzling as choosing a 
ribbon ... or a husband. 

Now on a question of millinery, or of man-millinery, I 
should be slow to venture an opinion. But style is a less 
intricate matter ; and with regard to the choice of words a 
clear and simple rule may be laid down, which can hardly 
be followed too punctually or too assiduously. First how¬ 
ever, as it is a lady I am addressing, let me advise you to 
lessen your perplexities by restricting yourself to home 
manufactures. You may perhaps think it looks pretty to 
garnish your letters with such phrases as de tout mon coeur. 
Now with all my heart is really better English: the only 
advantage on the side of the other expression is its being 
less sincere. Whatever may be the superiority of French 
silks, or French lace, English words sound far best from 
English lips: and, notwithstanding the example of Desdemona, | 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 203 

one can seldom look with perfect complacency on the woman 
who gives up her heart to the son of another people. Man 
may leave country as well as father and mother : for action 
and thought find their objects everywhere. But must not 
feelings pine and droop, when cut off from the home and 
speech of their childhood ? 

As a general maxim however, when you come to a cross¬ 
road, you can hardly do better than go right onward. You 
would do so involuntarily in speaking : do so likewise in 
writing. When you doubt between two words, choose the 
plainest, the commonest, the most idiomatic. Eschew fine 
words, as you would rouge : love simple ones, as you would 
native roses on your cheeks. Act as you might be disposed 
to do on your estate : employ such words as have the largest 
families, keeping clear of foundlings, and of those of which \ 
nobody can tell whence they come, unless he happens to be 
a scholar. 

This is just the advice which Ovid gives : 

Munda, sed e medio, consuetaque verba, puellae 
Scribite : sermonis publica forma placet. 

To the same effect is the praise which Chaucer bestows on 
his Virginia : 

Though she were wise as Pallas, dare I sain 
Her faconde eke full womanly and plain. 

No contrefeted termes hadde she 
To semen wise : but after her degree 
She spake; and all her wordes more or less 
Sounding in virtue and in gentillesse. 

Exquisite examples of this true mother English are to be 
found in the speeches put by Shakspeare into the mouth of 
his female characters. “ No fountain from its rocky cave 
E’er tript with foot so free : ” never were its waters clearer, 
more transparent, or more musical. This indeed is the 
peculiar beauty of a feminine style, munda verba ,, sed e 
medio , consuetaque , choice and elegant words, but such as are 
familiar in wellbred conversation,—words not used scienti¬ 
fically, or technically, or etymologically, but according to 
their customary meaning. It is from being guided wholly i 










204 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

by usage, undisturbed by extraneous considerations, and 
from their characteristic fineness of discernment with regard 
to what is fit and appropriate, as well as from their being 
much less blown about by the vanity of writing cleverly or 
sententiously, that sensible, educated women have a simple 
grace of style rarely attained by men; whose minds are ever 
and anon caught and entangled in briary thickets of kotos, 
and how-fars , and whys, and why-nots ; and who often think 
much less what they have to say, than in what manner 
they shall say it. For it is in writing, as in painting and 
sculpture : let the artist adapt the attitudes of his figures to 
the feeling or action he wishes to express ; and, if his mind 
has been duly impregnated with the idea of the human form, 
without his intending it they will be graceful : whereas, if 
his first aim be to make them graceful, they are sure to be 
affected. 

When women however sally out of their proper sphere 
into that of objective, reflective authorship,—for which they 
are disqualified, not merely by their education and habits, 
but by the subjective character of their minds, by the pre¬ 
dominance of their feelings over their intellect, and by 
their proneness to view everything in the light of their 
affections,—they often lose the simple graces of style, which 
within their own element belong to them. Here too may it 
be said, that “ the woman who deliberates is lost.” Going 
right, not from reflexion, not from calculating the reasons 
and consequences of each particular step, but from impulse, 
—whether instinctive, or derivative from habit, or from 
principle,—when a woman distrusts her impulses, and appeals 
to her understanding, she is not unlikely to stray; among 
other grounds, because this seldom happens, except when 
some wrong impulse is pulling against the right one, and 
when she wants an excuse for yielding to it. Men, in speech, 
as in action, may now and then forsake usage; having pre¬ 
viously explored the principles and laws, of which usage is 
ever an inadequate exponent. But no woman can safely 
defy usage, unless it be at the imperious, momentary call of 
some overpowering affection, the voice of which is its own 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 205 

■sanction, and one with the voice of Duty. When a woman 
deviates from usage, to comply with some rule which she 
supposes to run counter to it, she is apt to misapply the rule, 
from ignorance of its grounds and of its limits. For rules, 
though useful mementoes to such as understand their prin¬ 
ciples, have no light in themselves, and are mostly so framed 
as to fail us at the very moment of need. Clear enough 
when all is clear, they grow dim and go out when it is 
dark. 

The one which has just been proposed, of following your 
tongue when you are speaking, is a less sure guide for men 
than for women. Men’s minds have so often crawled forth, 
more or less, like a snail stretching out of its shell, from the 
region of impulse into that of reflexion, that they may need 
a secondary movement to resume their natural state, and 
replace the shell on their heads. With them what is nearest 
is often furthest off; and what is furthest is nearest. The 
"word which comes uppermost with them will frequently be 
the book-word, not the word of common speech ; especially 
if they are in the habit of public speaking, in which there is 
a strong temptation to make up for emptiness by sound, to 
give commonplace observations an uncommon look by swelling 
them out with bloated diction,—to tack a string of conven¬ 
tional phrases to the tail of every proposition, in the hope 
that this will enable it to fly,—and to take care that the 
buckram thoughts, in whatever respects they may resemble 
FalstafFs men, shall at least have plenty of buckram to strut 
in. Therefore a man, when writing, may often find occasion 
to substitute a plainer word for that which had first occurred 
to him. But with him too the rule holds good, that the 
plainest word, by which he can express his meaning, is the 
best. The beginning of Plato’s Republic is said to have been 
found in his tablets written over and over in a variety of 
ways : the regard for euphony, which was so strong in the 
Greeks, led him to try all those varieties of arrangement 
which the power of inversion in his language allowed of. 
Yet after all, the words, as they now stand, and the order of 
their arrangement, are the simplest he could have chosen ; 









206 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


and one can hardly conceive how they could have been other 
than they are. This is the secret '.of the matchless trans¬ 
parency of his style, through which we look at the thoughts 
exprest in it, standing as in the lucid distinctness given by 
a southern atmosphere ; so that only by a subsequent act of 
reflexion do we discern the exceeding beauty of the medium. 
Whereas in most writers the words scarcely let the thoughts 
peer dimly through, or at best deck them out in gorgeous 
hues, and draw attention to themselves, veiling what they 
ought to reveal. 

The principle I have been urging coincides with that 
of Cobbett’s great rule : “ Never think of mending what you 
write : let it go : no patching. As your pen moves, bear 
constantly in mind that it is making strokes which are to 
remain for ever.” The power of habit, he rightly observes, 
is in such things quite wonderful : and assuredly it is not 
merely our style that would be improved, if we bore con¬ 
stantly in mind that what we do is to last for ever. Did we 
but keep this conviction steadily before us, with regard to 
all our thoughts and feelings and words and purposes and 
deeds, then might we sooner learn to think and feel and 
speak and resolve and act as becomes the heirs of eternity. 
One of the main seats of our weakness lies in this very 
notion, that what we do at the moment cannot matter much; 
for that we shall be able to alter and mend and patch it just 
as we like by and by. Cobbett’s own writings are a proof of 
the excellence of his rule : what they may want in elegance, 
they more than make up for in strength. His indeed was a 
case in which it was especially applicable. Springing out of 
the lower orders, and living in familiar intercourse with them, 
he knew their language : he knew the words which have 
power over the English people : he knew how those words 
must be wielded to strike home on their understandings and 
their hearts. His mind had never been tainted with the 
jargon of men of letters : he had no frippery to throw off ere 
he could appear in his naked strength : he scorned flourishes 
and manoovres, and marcht straight with all his forces to the 
onset. 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


207 


In some measure akin to Cobbett’s writings in style, 
though with differences resulting both from personal and 
national character, are those of the honest and hearty 
German patriot, Arndt, which did such good service in 
kindling and feeding the enthusiasm during the war with 
France. He too was a child of the people, a peasant boy 
who used to feed his father’s cows j and his wings had not 
been dipt in the schools. So was Luther; whom one can 
hardly conceive recalling and correcting a word, any more 
than one can conceive the sun recalling and correcting one 
of his rays, or the sea one of its waves. He who has 
a full quiver, does not pick up his arrows. If the first 
misses, he sends another and another after it. Forgetting 
what is behind, he presses onward. It is only in going 
through one’s exercise, that one retraces a false move¬ 
ment, and begins anew. To do so in battle would be to 
lose it. 

There is said indeed to be a manuscript of Luther’s version 
of the first Psalm with a great number of interlineations 
and corrections. This however was a translation : and only 
when a man’s thoughts issue from his own head and heart, 
can they come forth ready clad in the fittest words. A 
translator’s aim is more complicated; and all he can 
hope is to approximate nearer and nearer to it. For no 
language can ever be the complete counterpart of another : 
indeed no single word in any language can be the com¬ 
plete counterpart to a word in another language, so as 
to have exactly the same shades and varieties of meaning, 
and to be invested with the same associations. Hence a 
conscientious translator is perpetually drawn in opposite 
directions, from the wish to accomplish two incompatible 
objects, to give an exact representation of his original, and 
at the same time to make that representation an idiomatic 
one. Difficult as it often must needs be to express one’s 
own meaning to one’s wish, it is incomparably more difficult 
to express another man’s, without making him say more or 
less than he intended. 

That the practice inculcated above has the highest of all 



20S 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


sanctions,.is proved by the Preface to the first edition of 
Shakspeare, where the editors say of him, “ His mind and 
hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with 
that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot 
in his papers.” The same thing is true of the greatest 
master of style in our days : in the manuscripts of his 
exquisite Imaginary Conversations very few words have ever 
been altered : every word was the right one from the first. 
I have also observed the same fact in Arnold’s manuscripts, 
in which indeed, from the simple, easy flow of his style, one 
might sooner expect it. But Lieber tells us that Niebuhr 
also said to him, “ Endeavour never to strike out anything 
of what you have once written down. Punish yourself by 
allowing once or twice something to pass, though you see 
you might give it better : it will accustom you to be more 
careful in future; and you will not only save much time, 
but also think more correctly and distinctly. I hardly ever 
strike out or correct my writing, even in my dispatches to 
the king. Persons who have never tried to "write at once 
correctly, do not know how easy it is, provided your thoughts 
are clear and well arranged ; and they ought to be so before 
you put pen to paper.” Thus a style, which appears most 
elaborate, and in which the thoughts would seem to have 
been subjected to a long process of condensation, may grow 
to be written almost spontaneously; as a person may learn 
to write the stiffest hand with considerable rapidity. Lieber 
however also cites the similar confession in Gibbon’s Memoirs; 
which shews that this practice is no preservative from all the 
vices of affectation. For anything may become nature to 
man : the rare thing is to find a nature that is truly 
natural. u. 


Cesar’s maxim, that you are to avoid an unusual word as 
you would a rock, is often quoted, especially by those who 
are just purposing to violate it. For this is one of the 
strange distortions of vanity,—which loves to magnify the 
understanding, at the cost of the will,—that people, when 
they are doing wrong, are fond of boasting that they know 





GUES3ES AT TRUTH. 


20D 


it to be wrong. Cesar himself however was a scrupulous 
observer of his own rule. A like straightforward plainness 
of speech characterizes the English Cesar of our age, and is 
found, with an admixture of philosophical sweetness, in 
Xenophon. In truth simplicity is the soldierly style. The 
most manly of men coincide in this point with the most 
womanly of women. The latter think of the feelings they 
are to express j the former, of the thoughts and purposes 
and actions; neither, of the words. 

Not however that new words are altogether to be outlawed. 
What would language have been, had this principle been 
acted on from the first ? It must have been dwarft in the 
cradle. Did thoughts remain stationary, so might language : 
but they cannot be progressive without it. The only way in 
which a conception can become national property, is by being 
named. Hereby it is incorporated with the body of popular 
thought. Either a word already in use may have a more 
determinate meaning assigned to it : or a new word may be 
formed, according to the analogies of the language, by deri¬ 
vation or composition : or in a language in which the 
generative power is nearly extinct, a word may be adopted 
from some forein tongue which has already supplied it with 
similar terms. Only such words should be intelligible at 
sight to the readers they are designed for. This is one great 
objection to the new Greek words which Mr Bentham scatters 
over his pages, side by side with his amorphous, tumble-to- 
pieces English ones, like Columbine dancing with Pantaloon. 
They want a note to explain what he meant them to mean, 
and are just such lifeless things as might be expected from 
a man who grinds them out of his lexicon,—such dry chips 
as may drop from a writer whose mind is a dead hedge of 
abstractions ; whose chief talent moreover is that of a hedge, 
to intersect and partition off the field of knowledge. When 
words are thus brought in with a commentary at their heels, 
it is much as if a musician were to stop in the middle of a 
tune, and tell you what notes he is playing. 

To the last of the three classes just mentioned belongs 
the terminology of Science, which is almost wholly Greek. 


p 













210 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


No language was ever so full of life as the Greek in its 
prime : and, as there have been instances of seeds which 
have retained their vital power for millennaries, the embers 
of life still linger about it; so that two thousand years after, 
and a thousand miles off, we find it easier to grow Greek 
words than English. The plastic character of the language, 
affording unlimited facilities for composition,—and in such 
wise that its words really coalesce, and are not merely tackt 
together,—fits it for expressing the innumerable combina¬ 
tions, which it is the business of Science to detect. And as 
Science is altogether a cosmopolite, less connected than any 
other mode of intellectual action with the peculiarities of 
national character,—wherefore the eighteenth century, which 
confounded science with knowledge, set up the theory of 
cosmopolitism,—it is well that the vocabulary of Science 
should be common to all the nations that come and worship 
at its shrine. 

Of all words however the least vivacious are those coined 
by Science. It is only Poetry, and not Philosophy, that can. 
make a Juliet. It is Poetry, the Imagination in one or 
other of its forms, that produces what has life in it. 
Eschylus, Shakspeare, Milton, are wordmakers. So are most 
humorists, Aristophanes, Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, Charles 
Lamb, Richter: only many of their words are merely 
fashioned sportively for a particular occasion, after some 
amusing analogy, without any thought of their becoming a 
permanent part of the language. The true criterion of the 
worth of a new word is its having such a familiar look, and 
bearing its meaning and the features of its kindred so visible 
in its face, that we hardly know whether it is not an old 
acquaintance.* Then more especially is it likely to be 
genuine, when its author himself is scarcely conscious of its 
novelty. At all events it should not seem to be the fruit of 
study, but to spring spontaneously from the inspiration of 
the moment. 

The corruption of style does not lie in a writer’s occasion¬ 
ally using an uncommon or a new word. On the contrary a 
masculine writer, who has been led to adopt a plain, simple 











GUESSES AT TEUTH. 


211 


style, not like women, by an instinctive delicacy of taste, but 
by a reflex act of judgement, and who has taken pleasure in 
visiting the sources of his native language, and in tracing 
its streams, will feel desirous at times to throw his seed also 
j upon the waters : and he is thS very person whose studies 
will best fit him for doing so. Even Cowper, whose letters 
j are the pattern of pure, graceful, idiomatic English, does not 
hesitate to coin new words now and then. Such are, extra- 
foraneous, which, though he is so fond of it as to desire that 
it should be inserted in Johnson’s Dictionary, and to use it 
more than once (Yol. iv. p. 76, vi. 153, of Southey’s Edition), 
is for common purposes a cumbrous substitute for out-of- 
doors,—a subscalarian, “ a man that sleeps under the stairs ” 
(vi. 286), —an archdeaconism (iv. 228), —syllablemongers (v. 
23),— a joltation (v. 55),— calfless (v. 61),— secondhanded 
(v. 87), a word inaccurately formed, as according to analogy 
it should mean, not at second hand , "but having a second hand , 
—authorly (v. 96),— exsputory (v. 102),— returnable , likely 
to return (v. 102), —translatorship (v. 253), —poetship (v. 313), 
— a midshipmanship (“ there’s a word for you ! ” he exclaims, 
vi. 263),— man-merchandise (vi. 127),— Homer-conners (vi. 
268), —walJcable (vi. 13),— seldomcy (vi. 228). I know not 
that any of these words is of much value. The last is 
suggested by an erroneous analogy. “ I hope none of my 
correspondents (he says) will measure my regard for them by 
the frequency, or rather seldomcy , of my epistles.” A Latin 
termination is here subjoined to a Saxon word, which such a 
termination very rarely fits: and two consonants are brought 
into juxtaposition, from which in our language they revolt. 

Some of these words may perhaps have been already in 
use, at least in speech, if not in writing. It would be both 
entertaining and instructive, were any one to collect the 
words in English invented by particular authors, and to 
explain the reasons which may either have occasioned or 
hindered their being incorporated with the body of the 
language. In some cases no want of the word has been felt: 
in others the formation has been incorrect, or unsupported 
by any familiar analogy. Learning of itself indeed will 













212 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


never avail to make words : but in ages when the formative 
instinct is no longer vivid, judgement and knowledge are 
requisite to guide it. For the best and ablest writers are apt 
to err on this score, as we saw just now in the instance of 
seldomcy. Thus even Lancfer ( Imaginary Convert ii. 278) 
recommends the adoption of anidiomatic as an English 
word ; though our language does not acknowledge the Greek 
negative prefix, except in words like anarchy , introduced in 
their compound state, so that anidiomatical would exemplify 
itself; and though unidiomatic would clearly be a prefer¬ 
able form, which few writers would scruple to use, whether 
authorized by precedent or no. Nor, I trust, will Coleridge’s 
favorite word, esemplastic (Biographia Liter aria i. 157), to 
express the atoning or unifying power of the Imagination, 
ever become current • for, like others of his Greek com¬ 
pounds, it violates the analogies of that language. Had such 
a word existed, it would be compounded of eis ev nXaTreiv, 
not, as he intended, of els ev lAarreiv. On the other hand 
his word to desynonymize ( Biog . Lit. i. 87) is a truly valuable 
one, as designating a process very common in the history of 
language, and bringing a new thought into general circula¬ 
tion. A Latin preposition is indeed prefixt to a Greek 
theme : but such mixtures are inevitable in a composite 
language; and this is sanctioned by the words dephlegmate 
and dephlogisticate: after the analogy of which I have 
ventured above (p. 143) to frame the word desophisticating. 

Few eminent writers, I believe, have not done more or 
less toward enriching their native tongue. Thus Rousseau, 
in one of his letters in defense of his Discourse on the Influ¬ 
ence of the Arts and Sciences, vindicates his having hazarded 
the word investigation, on the ground that he had wisht 
“ rendre un service a la langue, en essayant d’y introduce 
un terme doux, harmonieux, dont le sens est deja connu, et 
qui n’a point de synonyme en fra^ais, C’est, je crois, 
toutes les conditions qu’on exige pour autoriser cette liberte 
salutaire.” Sometimes too an author’s bequests to his 
countrymen do not stay quietly at home, but travel from 
nation to nation, and become a permanent part of the 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


213 


language of mankind. What a loss would it be to the 
languages of modern Europe, if Plato’s word, idea , and 
Pythagorases, philosophy , with their families, were struck 
out of them ! It would be like striking out an eye; and 
we should hardly know how to grope our way through the 
realms of thought without them. Again, when we read in 
Diogenes Laertius (iii. 24) that Plato irpcoros iv (jn\o(ro(j)la 

dvrlnodas avopace, ml crToi^fiov, ml diaXeKTiKrjv, ml noLOTrjTa , 
ml tu>v nepdroov rrjv iniTTebov eniffiaveiav, ml Oeov irpovoiav , we 
may see from this, without enquiring into the accuracy of 
each particular statement, what a powerful lever a well- 
chosen word may be for helping on the progress of thought, 
—how it may embody the results of long processes of medi¬ 
tation, and present those results in a form in which they may 
not only be apprehended at once by every person of intelli¬ 
gence, but may be used as materials for ulterior speculations, 
like known quantities for the determination of unknown. 
Various instances of like pregnant words, in which great 
authors have embodied the results of their speculations,—of 
words “ which assert a principle, while they appear merely 
to indicate a transient notion, preserving as well as expressing 
truths,”—are pointed out in the great History of the Inductive 
Sciences, in which one of Bacon’s worthiest and most enlight¬ 
ened disciples has lately been tracing the progress of scientific 
discovery throughout the whole world of Nature. 

A far worse fault than that of occasionally introducing a 
new word,—which is not only allowable, but often necessary, 
as new thoughts keep continually rising above the national 
horizon,—is that of writing throughout in words alien from 
the speech of the people. Few writers are apter to fall into 
this fault, than those who deem it their post to watch and 
set up a bark at the first approach of a stranger. The gods 
in Homer now and then use a word different from that of 
ordinary men : but he who thinks to speak the language of 
the gods, by speaking one altogether remote from that of 
ordinary men, will only speak the language of the goblins. 
He is not a mystic, but a mystifier. u - 


















214 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


There are three genial and generative periods in the 
history of language. 

The first, and far the most important, is that in which the 
great elementary processes are gone through : when the 
laws and form of the language are determined, and the body 
of the thoughts of a people, whether arising out of the 
depths of its own character, or awakened by the objects 
around it, fashion and find their appropriate utterance. 
This is a period of wdiich little notice can be preserved. We 
are seldom able to watch the processes while they are 
working. In a primitive, homogeneous language that 
working is over, before it comes forward in a substantial, 
permanent shape, and takes its seat in the halls of Litera¬ 
ture : and even in a composite language, like our own, 
arising out of the confluence and fusion of two, we have 
scanty means for observing their mutual action upon each 
other. We see them flowing for a while side by side : then 
both vanish like the Rhine at Laufenburg : and anon the | 
mingled streams start into sight again, though perhaps not 
quite thoroughly blended, but each in a manner preserving a 
distinct current for a time, as the Rhone and Saone do at 
their junction. In this stage a language is rich in expres¬ 
sions for outward objects, and for simple feelings and actions, 
but contains few abstract terms, and not many compound 
words, except such as denote obvious combinations of frequent 
occurrence. The laws and principles of such compositions 
however are already establisht: and here and there instances 
are found of some of the simplest abstract terms ; after the 
analogy of which others are subsequently framed, according 
to the growing demands of reflexion. Such is the state of 
our own language in the age of Chaucer : such is that of the 
German in the N ibelungen-Lay ; and that of the Greek in 
Hesiod and in Homer : in the latter of whom however we 
already hear the snorting of the horses that are drawing on 
the car of Apollo, and see the sparks that flash up beneath 
their feet, as they rush along the pavement of heaven. 

Thus far a language has very little that is arbitrary in it, 
very little betokening the conscious power and action of 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 215 

man. It owes its origin, not to the thoughts and the will of 
individuals, but to an instinct actuating a whole people : it 
expresses what is common to them all: it has sprung out of 
their universal wants, and lives in their hearts. But after a 
•while an intellectual aristocracy come forward, and frame a 
new language of their own. The princes and lords of 
thought shoot forth their winged words into regions beyond 
the scan of the people. They require a gold coinage, in 
addition to the common currency. This is avowed by Sir 
Thomas Brown in his Preface. “ Nor have we addrest our 
pen or style to the people, (whom books do not redress, and 
are this way incapable of reduction,) but to the knowing and 
leading part of learning ; as well understanding,—except 
they be watered from higher regions and fructifying meteors 
of knowledge, these weeds must lose their alimental sap, and 
wither of themselves.” The Imagination, finding out its 
powers and its office, and feeling its freedom, begins to 
fashion and mould and combine things according to its own 
laws. It is no longer content to reflect the outward world 
and its forms just as it has received them, with such modifi¬ 
cations and associations alone as have been bestowed on 
them in the national mythology. It seizes the elements 
both of outward nature and of human, and mixes them up 
in its crucible, and bakes them anew in its furnace. It 
discerns within itself, that there are other shapes and visions 
of grandeur and beauty, beside those which roll before the 
eye,—that there are other sympathies, and deeper harmonies 
and discords : and for this its new creation it endeavours to 
devise fitting symbols in words. This is the age of genial 
power in poetry, and of a luxuriant richness in language; 
the age of Eschylus and Aristophanes; the age of Ennius 
and Lucretius,—who however must be measured by the 
Roman scale ; the age of Shakspeare and Milton. It may 
be termed the heroic age of language, coming after its golden 
age, during which, from the unbroken unity of life, there was 
no call or room for heroes. Custom has not yet markt out 
the limits within which the plastic powers of the language 
must be restrained: and they who feel their own strength, 










216 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

and that of their weapon, fancy there is nothing they may" 
not achieve with it. Of the new words formed in this age, 
many find an echo long after amid the hights of literature ; 
some are so peculiar, they can fit no place except the one 
they were made for; many fall to the ground and are 
forgotten, when the sithe of summer mows off the rich 
bloom of spring. 

The third great period in the history of a language is that 
of its development, as an instrument of reason and reflexion. 
This is the age of verbal substantives, and of abstract 
derivatives from adjectives, formed, in a homogeneous 
language, after the analogy of earlier examples, but multi¬ 
plied far beyond what had sufficed for a simpler, less 
speculative generation. The dawn of this age we see 
struggling through the darkness in Thucydides; the 
difficulties of whose style arise in great measure from his 
efforts to express thoughts so profound and farstretching 
in a language scarcely adapted as yet to such purposes. 
For, though potentially it had an indefinite wealth in general 
terms, that wealth was still lying for the most part in the j 
mine : and the simple epical accumulation of sentences, by 
means of connective particles, was only beginning to give 
way to a compacter, more logical structure, by the particles 
of causality and modality. In England, as indeed through¬ 
out the whole of modern Europe, the order assigned by 
Nature for the successive unfolding of the various intellectual 
powers, in nations as well as individuals,—an order which, 
unless disturbed by extraneous causes, would needs be far 
more perceptible, as all general laws are, in an aggregate 
than in a single unit,—was in some degree altered by the 
influx of the traditional knowledge amast by prior ages. 
That knowledge, acting more powerfully, and with more 
certain benefit, on the reasoning faculties than on the 
imaginative, accelerated the growth of the former, and 
brought them to an earlier maturity ; a result owing mainly 
to the existence of a large class, who, being the chief j 
depositaries of knowledge, were specially led by their I 
piofession, and by the critical and stirring circumstances of * 











GUESSES AT TEUTII. 


217 


the times, to a diligent pursuit of all studies concerning the 
moral and spiritual nature of man. Hence the philoso¬ 
phical cultivation of our language coincided with its poetical 
cultivation : and this prematurity was the more easily 
attainable, inasmuch as the mass of our philosophical words 
were not of home growth, but imported ready-grown from 
abroad; so that, like oranges, they might be in season 
along with primroses and violets. Yet the natural order was 
so far upheld, that, w T hile the great age of our poetry is com¬ 
prised in the last quarter of the sixteenth, and the first quarter 
of the seventeenth century, the great age of our philosophy 
and theology reaches down till near the close of the latter. 
Milton stands alone, and forms a link between the two. 

When a nation reaches its noon however, the colour, of 
objects lose much of their brightness ; and even their forms 
and masses stand out less boldly and strikingly. It occupies 
itself rather in examining and analysing their details. 
Finding itself already rich, it lives on its capital, instead of 
making fresh ventures to increase it, and boasts that this is 
the only rational, gentlemanly way of living. The super¬ 
abundant activity, which it will not employ in anything 
positive, finds a vent in negativeness,—in denying that any 
previous state of society was comparable to its own, and in 
issuing peremptory vetoes against all who would try to raise 
it higher. This is the age when an academy w T ill lay down 
laws dictatorially, and proclaim what may be said, and what 
must not, what may be thought, and what must not,—the 
age when men will scoff at the madness of Xerxes, yet 
themselves try to fling their chains over the ever-rolling, 
irrepressible ocean of thought. Nay, they will scoop out a 
mimic sea in their pleasure-ground, and make it ripple and 
bubble, and spout up prettily into the air, and then fancy 
that they are taming the Atlantic; which however keeps 
advancing upon them, until it sweeps them away with their 
toys. The interdict against every new word or expression 
during the century previous to the Revolution in France was 
only one chapter of the interdict which society then enacted 
against everything genial; and here too that restlessness, 











218 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

which can never be wholly allayed, became negative; and 
all that was genial was in sin. The dull flat of the Henriade 
abutted on the foaming hellpool of the Pucelle. 

The futility of all attempts to check the growth of a 
language, so long at least as a nation continues to exercise 
any activity even in the lower departments of thought, is 
proved by the successive editions of the Dictionary publisht 
by the French Academy. Not content with crushing and 
stifling freedom in the State, Richelieu’s ambition aimed at 
becoming autocrat of the French language. He would have 
had no word uttered throughout the realm, until he had 
countersigned it. But ancient usage, and the wants of pro¬ 
gressive civilization were too mighty for him. Every time 
the Academy have issued their Dictionary afresh, they have 
found themselves compelled to admit a number of new words 
into their censorial register : and in the last fifty years more 
especially a vast influx has taken place. If we look into 
their modern writers, even into those who, like Chateaubriand, 
while they acknowledge the power of the present, still retain 
a reverent allegiance to the past, we find new words ever 
sprouting up : and the popular literature of la jeune France , 
of those who are the minions, deeming themselves the lords, 
of the present, seems in language and style, as well as in 
morals, to bear the character of slavery that has burst its 
bonds, to be as it were an insurrection of intellectual negroes, 
rioting in the licence of a lawless, fetterless will. u. 

That in writing Latin no word should be used, unless 
sanctioned by the authority of Cicero, or of the Augustan 
age, is, I believe, a purely modern notion,—and an utterly 
absurd one, if extended to anything else than a scholastic 
exercise. For Cicero first taught Philosophy to talk with 
elegance in Latin ; and in doing so he often went round the 
mark, rather than straight to it: whereas the fitting of a 
language to be an instrument of reflective and speculative 
thought must be the work of many minds, and of more than 
one generation. A number of new ideas were drawn forth 
by the discipline of adversity during the first century of the 





GUESSES AT TRUTH. 219 

empire. Repelled from outward objects, which till then had 
been all in all to the Romans, men turned their eyes inward, 
and explored the depths of their own nature, if so be they 
might discover something there, that would stand firm 
against the shock and amid the ruin of the world ; while all 
forms of evil were shooting up in loathsome enormity on 
every side. Hence the writers in the days of Nero, and 
those in the days of Trajan, had much to say, and said 
much, that had never entered into the minds of their fore¬ 
fathers. In the latter ages of Roman literature attempts 
were made to revive many antiquated words : but no life 
could be restored to them; and they merely lie like the 
bones of the dead around a decaying body. For the re¬ 
generation of a language can never be genuine and lasting, 
except so far as it goes along with a regeneration of the 
national mind: whereas the Roman mind was dying away, 
and had no longer the power of incorporating the new 
regions of thought thrown open to it. A flood of barbarisms 
rusht in : Christianity came, with its host of spiritualities : 
all the mysteries of man’s nature were to find utterance in 
Latin, which had always been better fitted for the forum 
than for the schools. It became the language of the learned, 
when learning was unfortunately cut off from communion 
with actual life, and when the past merely lay as a huge, 
shapeless shadow spread out over the germs of the future. 
Yet, so indispensable is the power of producing new words to 
a language, when it is applied to any practical use, Latin, 
even after it had ceast to be spoken, still retained a sort of 
life, like that which lingers in the bark of a hollow tree long- 
after its core has mouldered away : and still for centuries it 
kept on putting forth a few fresh leaves. u * 

A sort of English has been very prevalent during the last 
hundred years, in which the sentences have a meaning, but 
the words have little or none. As in a middling landscape 
the general outlines may be correct, and the forms distin¬ 
guishable, while the details are hazy and indefinite and 
confused ; so here the abstract proposition designed to be 














220 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

exprest is so; but hardly a word is used for which half a 
dozen synonyms might not have stood equally well: whereas 
the test of a good style, as Coleridge observes ( Biog . Lit. ii. 
162), is “ its untranslatableness in words of the same 
language, without injury to the meaning.” This may be 
called Scotch English; not as being exclusively the property 
I of our northern brethren ; but because the celebrated Scotch 
writers of the last century are in the first rank of those who 
have emboweled the substantial, roast-beef and plum-pudding 
English of our forefathers. Their precedence in this respect 
is intimately connected with their having been our principal 
writers on metaphysical subjects since the days of Locke and 
Shaftesbury and Thomas Burnet and Berkeley and Butler. 
For metaphysical writers, especially when they belong to a 
school, and draw their principles from their master s cistern 
through conduit after conduit, instead of going to the well 
of Nature, are very apt to give us vapid water instead of 
fresh. Attaching little importance to anything but abstrac¬ 
tions, and being almost without an eye, except for colourless 
shadows, they merge whatever is individual in that which is 
merely generic, and let this living universe of infinite variety 
drop out of sight in the menstruum of a technical phraseo¬ 
logy. They lose the sent in the cry, but keep on yelping 
without finding out their loss : not a few too join in the cry, 
j without having ever caught the sent. How far this will go, 
j may be seen in the dead language of the Schoolmen, who 
often deal with their words just as if they were so many 
counters, the rust having eaten away every atom of the 
original impress. In like manner, when the dry rot gets 
into the house of a German philosopher, his disciples pick up 
handfuls of the dust, and fancy it will serve instead of 
timbers. Even Greek, notwithstanding the vivacity both of 
the people and the language, lost much of its life and grace 
in the hands of the later philosophers. Accordingly this 
Scotch English is the usual style of our writers on specula- 
| tive subjects. 

Opposite to this, and almost the converse of it, is Irish 
English; in which every word taken by itself means, or is 















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 221 

meant to mean something; but he who looks for any 
meaning in a sentence, might as well look for a green field 
in St. Gileses. Every Irishman, the saying goes, has a 
potato in his head : many, I think, must have a whole crop 
of them. At least the words of their orators are wont to 
roll out just like so many potatoes from the mouth of a sack, 
round, and knobby, and rumbling, and pothering, and 
incoherent. This style too is common nowadays, especially 
that less kindly, and therefore less Irish modification of it, 
where the potatoes become prickly, and every word must be 
smart, and every syllable must have its point, if not its 
sting. No style is so well suited to scribblers for magazines 
and journals, and other like manufactures of squibs which 
&re to explode at once, and which, if they did not crack and 
flash, would vanish without anybody’s heeding them. 

What then is English English ? It is the combination of 
the two ; not that vulgar combination in which they would 
neutralize, but that in which they strengthen and give effect 
to each other; where the unity of the whole is not disturbed 
by the elaborate thrusting forward of the parts, as that of a 
Dutch picture is often by a herring or an onion, a silk-gown 
or a rut; nor is the canvas daubed over with slovenly haste 
to fill up the outline, as in many French and later Italian 
and Flemish pictures; but where, as in the works of 
Raphael and Claude, and of their common mistress, Nature, 
well-defined and beautiful parts unite to make up a well- 
defined and beautiful whole. This, like all good things, all 
such good things at least as are the products of human 
labour and thought, is rare : but it is still to be found 
amongst us. The exquisite purity of Wordsworth’s English 
has often been acknowledged. An author in whose pages 
the combination is almost always realized, and many of 
whose sentences are like crystals, each separate word in 
them being itself a lucid crystal, has been quoted several 
times above. And everybody has seen the writings of 
another, who may convince the most desponding worshiper 
of bygone excellence, that our language has not yet been so 
diluted and enervated, but Swift, were he living in these 










1 222 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

days, would still find plain words to talk plain sense in. 
Nor do they stand alone. In this at least we may boast 
! with Sthenelus, that we are better than our fathers : only 
j they who indulge in such a boast, should remind themselves 
I of their duty, by following it up with Hector’s prayer, that 
our children may be much better than we are. Southey’s 
writings, in style, as in other respects, have almost every 
merit except the highest. Arnold’s style is worthy of his 
manly understanding, and the noble simplicity of his 
character. And the new History of Greece is the antipode 
to its predecessor in this quality, no less than in every 
other.—1836. u. 


A word which has no precise meaning, will poorly fulfil 
its office of being a sign and guide of thought : and if it be 
connected with matters interesting to the feelings, or of 
' practical moment, it may easily become mischievous. Now 
in a language like ours, in which the abstract terms are 
i mostly imported from abroad, such terms, when they get 
into general circulation, are especially liable to be misunder¬ 
stood and perverted ; inasmuch as few can have any distinct 
conception what their meaning really is, or how they came 1 
by it. Having neither taproots, nor lateral roots, they are 
j easily shaken and driven out of line; and one gust may 
blow them on one side, another on another side. Hence 
arises a confusion of tongues, even within the pale of the 
same language ; and this breeds a confusion of thoughts. 
Of all classes of paralogisms the most copious is that where 
a word, used in one sense in the premiss, slips another sense, 
into the conclusion. 

For instance, no small part of the blunders made by 
modern theorizers on education may be traced to their 
ignorance or forgetfulness that education is something more 
than instruction , and that instruction is only the most pro¬ 
minent part of it,—but the part which requires the least 
care, the least thought, and is practically of the least im¬ 
portance. Nor is this errour confined to theorizers : it has? 
crept into every family. Most parents, of whatsoever rank 

















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 223 

or condition, fancy they have done all they need do for the 
education of their children, when they have had them 
taught such things as custom requires that persons of their 
class should learn : although with a view to the formation of 
character, the main end and object of education, it would be 
almost as reasonable to read a treatise on botany to a 
flower-bed, under a notion of making the plants grow and 
blossom. Nay, even those who set themselves to instruct 
youth, too often forget that their aim should be to unfold 
and discipline and strengthen the minds of their pupils, to 
inspire them with a love of knowledge, and to improve their 
faculties for acquiring it, and not merely to load and stuff 
them with a certain ready-made quantity of knowledge ; 
which is only power, when it is living, firmly grounded, 
reproducible, and expansive. 

So again there is a tribe of errours, both speculative and 
practical, which have arisen from the mistaking of Adminis¬ 
tration for Government , and the confounding of their appro* 
priate provinces and functions. In our country the Ministry 
have long been vulgarly termed the Government; and the 
Prime Minister is strangely misnamed the head of the 
Government; although they have no constitutional existence, 
and are therefore removable at the pleasure of a soverein or 
a parliament : so that, were they indeed the Government, 
and not merely the creatures and agents of a more per¬ 
manent body, we should be the sport of chance and caprice, 
as has ever happened to a people when fallen under a 
doulocracy. Yet, as they have usurpt the name, so have 
they in great measure the executive part of the office. Thus 
it has come to pass that, from the Land’s End to John of 
Groat’s House, scarcely a man any longer remembers that 
the business of governors is to govern. Above all have 
those who call themselves the Government forgotten this, 
persuading themselves that their duty is to be the servants, 
or rather the slaves, of circumstances and of public opinion. 
The divine exhortation,— He that would be chief among you y 
let him be your servant , that is, by his own will and deed, • 
whereby we are called to follow the example of Him who 



224 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

came not to be ministered to, but to minister,—is popularly 
misread after the Jewish fashion, —Make him your servant, 
yea, your slave, and give him the slaves punishment of the 
cross. The centralizing tendency, which rightly belongs to 
Government, and which has been extended during the last 
half century to all branches of Administration, both on the 
Continent, and latterly, after an example rather to have 
been shunned than followed, in England, is another instance 
of the same perversion. As a government is one, and should 
embrace all its subjects with its protecting arms, so it has 
been thought expedient that the rule of uniformity, the 
substitute of the understanding for the principle of unity, 
should be carried through all parts of the State, and that 
the administration should have a hand, or at least a finger, 
in every man’s business. In speculation too this leads to 
very erroneous judgements concerning countries and times 
in which juster views on the distinctive nature of Govern¬ 
ment and Administration prevailed. It must be owing to 
this general confusion, that in the recent ingenious and 
thoughtful Essay On the Attributes of a Statesman, though by 
a writer who mostly evinces the clearness of his under¬ 
standing by the correctness of his language, the Statesman’s 
real characteristics and duties are scarcely toucht upon : and 
he who ought to be the man of the State, whose eyes should 
be fixt on the State, and whose mind and heart should be 
full of it, shrinks up into the holder of a ministerial office. 

No less general, and far more mischievous, is another 
delusion, by which the same word, ministry, is confounded 
with the Church. He who enters into the ministry of the 
Church, is said to go into the Church, as though he were not 
in it before : the body of the ministers too, the Clergy, are 
commonly called the Church, and, by a very unfortunate, but 
inevitable consequence, are frequently lookt upon as forming, 
not merely a part, but the whole church. Hence politically 
the interests of the Church are deemed to be separate from 
those of the State; and the Church is accounted a portion 
of the State : whereas it should be coextensive and coin¬ 
cident therewith ; nay, should be the State itself spiritualized, 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 225 

under a higher relation, and in a higher power. Hence too 
m ordinary life the still greater evil, that the more peculiar 
duties of the Christian profession, as distinct from those 
enjoined by human ethics, are held to be incumbent on the 
Clergy alone : whereby their labours are deprived of help 
which they might otherwise receive, and which they greatly 
need. Indeed they themselves are far too ready to mono¬ 
polize their office, and to regard all interference of the Laity 
in spiritual or ecclesiastical matters as an impertinent 
intrusion. On the other hand the Laity, instead of being 
invited and encouraged to deem themselves integral members 
of the Church, and sharers in all the blessed duties of 
Christian fellowship, are led to fancy that these are things 
in which they have no concern, that all they have to do with 
the Church is to go on a Sunday to the building which bears 
its name, and that, if they only bring themselves to listen, 
they may leave it to the preacher to follow his own ex¬ 
hortations. 

I am not contending that in any of these instances the 
perversion in the meaning of the words has been the sole, 
or even the main source of the corresponding practical errour. 
Rather has the practical errour given birth to the verbal. 
It is the heart that misleads the head in the first instance 
nine times, for once that the head misleads the heart. Still 
errour, as well as truth, when it is stampt in words, gains 
currency, and diffuses and propagates itself, and becomes 
inveterate, and almost ineradicable. All that large and well- 
meaning class, who swell the train of public opinion, and 
who, without energy to do right on their own bottom, would 
often be loth to do what they recognised to be wrong, are 
apt to be the lackies of words, and will follow the blind more 
readily than the seeing. On the other hand, in proportion 
as every word is the distinct, determinate sign of the con¬ 
ception it stands for, does that conception form part and 
parcel of the nation’s knowledge. Now a language will often 
be wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the 
■wisest of those who speak it. Being like amber in its efficacy 
to circulate the electric spirit of truth, it is also like amber 


Q 








226 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


in embalming and preserving the relics of ancient wisdom, 
although one is not seldom puzzled to decipher its contents. 
Sometimes it locks up truths, which were once well known, 
but which in the course of ages have past out of sight and 
been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths, 
of which, though they were never plainly discerned, the 
genius of its framers caught a glimpse in a happy moment 
of divination. A meditative man cannot refrain from 
wonder, when he digs down to the deep thought lying at the 
root of many a metaphorical term, employed for the de¬ 
signation of spiritual things, even of those with regard to 
which professing philosophers have blundered grossly : and 
often it would seem as though rays of truths, which were 
still below the intellectual horizon, had dawned upon the 
Imagination as it was looking up to heaven. Hence they 
who feel an inward call to teach and enlighten their coun¬ 
trymen, should deem it an important part of their duty to 
draw out the stores of thought which are already latent in 
their native language, to purify it from the corruptions 
which Time brings upon all things, and from which lan¬ 
guage has no exemption, and to endeavour to give distinctness 
and precision to whatever in it is confused, or obscure, or 
dimly seen. 

And they who have been studious thus to purify their 
native tongue, may also try to enrich it. When any new 
conception stands out so broadly and singly as. to give it a 
claim for having a special sign to denote it,—if no word for 
the purpose can be found in the extant vocabulary of the 
language, no old word, which, with a slight clinamen given 
to its meaning, will answer the purpose,—they may frame a 
new one. But he who does not know how to prize the 
inheritance his ancestors have bequeathed to him, will 
hardly better or enlarge it. A man should love and venerate 
his native language, as the first of his benefactors, as the 
awakener and stirrer of all his thoughts, the frame and 
mould and rule of his spiritual being, as the great bond and 
medium of intercourse with his fellows, as the mirror in 
which he sees his own nature, and without which he could 





GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


227 


not even commune with himself, as the image in which the 
wisdom of God has chosen to reveal itself to him. He who 
thus thinks of his native language will never touch it 
without reverence. Yet his reverence will not withhold, but 
rather encourage him to do what he can to purify and 
improve it. Of this duty no Englishman in our times has 
shewn himself so well aware as Coleridge : which of itself is 
a proof that he possest some of the most important elements 
of the philosophical mind. Nor were his exertions in this 
way unsuccessful. Several words that he revived, some that 
he coined, are now become current, at least among writers 
on speculative subjects : and many are the terms in our 
philosophical vocabulary, which a while back were scattered 
about promiscuously, as if they all stood for pretty much 
the same thing, but which he has stampt afresh, so that 
people begin to have some notion of their meaning. 
Valuable contributions toward the same end are also to be 
found in the writings of Mr De Quincey; whose clear and 
subtile understanding, combined as it is with extensive and 
accurate learning, fits him above most men for such inves¬ 
tigations.—1836. __ u * 

A statesman, we are told, should follow public opinion. 
Doubtless ... as a coachman follows his horses; having 
firm hold on the reins, and guiding them. 

Suppose one’s horse runs away, what is one to do ? 

Fling the bridle on his neck, to be sure : and then you 
will be fit to be prime minister of England. 

But the horse might throw me. 

That too would be mob-like. They are fond of trampling 
on those who have bent and cringed to them.—1836. u. 

Ours till lately was a government of maxims, and perhaps 
is so in great measure still. The economists want to sub¬ 
stitute a despotism of systems. But who, until the coming 
of Christ’s Kingdom, can hope to see a government of 
principles ? __ 

Q - 












228 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

When a ship has run aground, the boats take her in tow. 
Is not this pretty much the condition of our government, 
perhaps of most governments nowadays % The art of 
governing, even in the sense of steering a state, will soon be 
reckoned among the lost arts, along with architecture, 
sacred music, sculpture, historical painting, and epic and 
dramatic poetry.—-1836. u. 

If a government is to stand a storm, it should have a 
strong anchorage ; and that is only to be found in the past. 
Custom attaches men in the long run, even more than 
personal affection, and far more than the clearest conviction 5 
as we see, among many other proofs, in the difficulty of 
breaking off a bad habit, however bad we may acknowledge 
and deeply feel it to be. 

The power of ancestral institutions has been strikingly 
manifested of late, on the one hand, in the unwillingness 
which the main body even of our Keformers,—in spite of 
party zeal, in spite of the charms of rashness and presump¬ 
tion, in spite of the fascination exercised by the love of 
destroying, and of rebuilding a new edifice of our own 
creation, in spite of the delusions of false theories,—have 
shewn to assail the fundamental principles of the Constitu¬ 
tion. On the other hand the same power has been evinced 
by the rapidity with which the feeling of the nation has 
been resuming its old level, notwithstanding what has been 
done to shake and pervert it, not merely by temporary 
excitements, but by the enormous changes in the distribution 
of wealth, and by the hordes of human beings that have 
swarmed wherever Commerce has sounded her bell. 

Does any one wish to see the converse, how soon the births 
of yesterday grow rotten, and send up a stench in the 
nostrils of a whole people % There is no necessity to cast 
our eyes back on the ghastly pantomime exhibited in France, 
when constitution followed constitution, each gaudier and 
flimsier and more applauded and more detested than its 
predecessors. Alas ! we are witnesses of a similar spectacle 
at home, where friend and foe are united in condemning and, 





GUESSES AT TRUTH. 229 

reviling what half a dozen years back was cried up as a 
marvellous structure of political wisdom, that was to be the 
glory and the bulwark of England for ages. 

This is the curse which waits on man’s wilfulness. Of our 
own works we soon grow weary : today we worship, tomorrow 
we loathe them. The laws we have imposed on ourselves, 
knowing how baseless and strengthless they are, we are 
impatient to throw off: and then we are glad to bow even 
to a yoke of iron, if it will but deliver us from the misery of 
being our own masters.—1836. u. 

Thrift is the best means of thriving. This is one of the 
truths that force themselves on the understanding of very 
early ages, when it is almost the only means: and few truths 
are such favorites with that selfish, housewifely shrewdness, 
which has ever been the chief parent and retailer of proverbs. 
Hence there is no lack of such sayings as, A pin a-day is a 
groat a-year. Take care of the pence; and the pounds will take 
care of themselves. 

Perhaps the former of these saws, which bears such 
Strongly markt features of homelier times, may be out of 
date in these days of inordinate gains, and still more inordi¬ 
nate desires; when it seems as though nobody could be 
satisfied, until he has dug up the earth, and drunk up the 
sea, and outgallopt the sun. Many now are so insensible to 
the inestimable value of a regular increase, however slow, 
that they would probably cry out scornfully, A fg for your 
groat ! Woidd you have me be at the trouble of picking up 
and laying by a pin a-day, for the sake of being a groat the 
richer at the end of the year ? 

Still both these maxims, taken in their true spirit, are 
admirable prudential rules for the whole of our housekeeping 
through life. Nor is their usefulness limited to the purse. 
That still more valuable portion of our property, our time, 
stands equally in need of good husbandry. It is only by 
making much of our minutes, that we can make much of our 
days and years. Every stitch that is let down may force us 
to unravel a score. 





I 

230 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

Moreover, in the intercourse of social life, it is by little 
acts of watchful kindness, recurring daily and hourly,— 
and opportunities of doing kindnesses, if sought for, are 
for ever starting up,—it is by words, by tones, by gestures, 
by looks, that affection is won and preserved. He who 
neglects these trifles, yet boasts that, whenever a great 
sacrifice is called for, he shall be ready to make it, will 
rarely be loved. The likelihood is, he will not make it : 
and if he does, it will be much rather for his own sake, 
than for his neighbour’s. Many persons indeed are said 
to be penny-wise and pound-foolish : but they who are 
penny-foolish will hardly be pound-wise ; although selfish 
vanity may now and then for a moment get the better of 
selfish indolence. For Wisdom will always have a micro¬ 
scope in her hand. 

But these sayings are still more. They are among the 
highest maxims of the highest prudence, that which super¬ 
intends the housekeeping of our souls. The reason why 
people so ill know how to do their duty on great occasions, 
is, that they will not be diligent in doing their duty on little 
occasions. Here too let us only take care of the pence ; and 
the pounds will take care of themselves : for God will be the 
Paymaster. But how will He pay us ? In kind doubtless : 
by supplying us with greater occasions, and enabling us to 
act worthily of them. 

On the other hand, as there is a law of continuity, whereby 
in ascending we can only mount step by step, so is there a 
law of continuity, whereby they who descend must sink, and 
that too with an ever increasing velocity. No propagation 
or multiplication is more rapid than that of evil, unless 
it be checkt,—no growth more certain. He who is in for 
a penny, to take another expression belonging to the same 
family, if he does not resolutely fly, will find he is in for a 
pound. n 


Few do all that is demanded of them. Few hands are 
steady enough to hold out a full cup, without spilling 
the wine. It is well therefore to have a cup which 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


231 


Trill contain something beyond the exact measure,—to 
require more than is absolutely necessary for the end we 
have in view. * 


One of the most important, but one of the most difficult 
things for a powerful mind is, to he its own master. Minerva 
should always be at hand, to restrain Achilles from blindly 
following his impulses and appetites, even those which are 
moral and intellectual, as well as those which are animal and 
sensual. A pond may lie quiet in a plain ; but a lake wants 
mountains to compass and hold it in. u. 

Is it from distrusting our reason, that we are always so 
anxious to have some outward confirmation of its verdicts % 
Or is it that we are such slaves to our senses, we cannot lift 
up our minds to recognise the certainty of any truths, but 
those which come to us through our eyes and ears h that, 
though we are willing to look up to the sky now and then, 
we want the solid ground to stand and lie on ? u. 

I was surprised just now to see a cobweb round a knocker: 
for it was not on the gate of heaven. u. 


We are apt to confound the potential mood with the 
optative. What we wish to do, we think we can do : but 
when we don’t wish a thing, it becomes impossible. 

Many a man’s vices have at first been nothing worse than 
good qualities run wild. u. 

Examples would indeed be excellent things, were not 
people so modest that none will set, and so vain that none 
will follow them. 

Surely half the world must be blind: they can see nothing, 
unless it glitters. 


A person who had been up in a balloon, was askt whether 











232 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

he did not find it very hot, when he got so near the sun. 
This is the vulgar notion of greatness. People fancy they 
shall get near the sun, if they can but discover or devise 
some trick to lift them from the ground. Nor would it be 
difficult to point out sundry analogies between these bladders 
from the wind-vaults of Eolus, and the means and imple¬ 
ments by which men attempt to raise themselves. All how¬ 
ever that can be effected in this way is happily altogether 
insignificant. The further we are borne above the plain of 
common humanity, the colder it grows : we swell out, till we 
are nigh to bursting : and manifold experience teaches us, 
that our human strength, like that of Anteus, becomes 
weakness, as soon as we are severed from the refreshing and 
renovating breast of our mighty Mother. 

On the other hand, it is in the lowly valley that the sun’s 
warmth is truly genial; unless indeed there are mountains 
so close and abrupt as to overshadow it. Then noisome 
vapours may be bred there : but otherwise in the valley may 
we behold the meaning of the wonderful blessing bestowed 
upon the meek, that they shall inherit the earth. It is theirs 
for this very reason, because they do not seek it. They do 
not exalt their heads like icebergs,—which by the by are 
driven away from the earth, and cluster, or rather jostle, 
around the Pole ; but they flow along the earth humbly and 
silently ; and, wherever they flow, they bless it; and so all 
its beauty and all its richness is reflected in their pure, calm, 
peaceful bosoms. u. 

The inheritance of the earth is promist to the godly. 
How inseparably is this promise bound up with the command 
to love our neighbours as ourselves ! For what is it to 
inherit land? To possess it; to enjoy it; to have it as our 
own. Now if we did love our fellow-men as ourselves , if their 
interests, their joys, their good were as dear to us as our 
own, then would all their property be ours. We should have 
the same enjoyment from it as if it were called by our name. 
We can feel the truth of this in the case of a dear friend, of 
a brother,—still more in that of a husband and wife, who, 





GUESSES AT TRUTH. 233 

though two persons, are in every interest one. Were this 
love extended to all, it would once more make all mankind 
one people and one family. To this end the first Christians 
sought to have all things in common : neither said any of 
them that aught of the things which he possest was his own. 
{Acts iv. 32). In proportion as we grow to think and feel , 
that the concerns of others are no less important to us than 
our own, in proportion as we learn to share their pleasures 
and their sorrows, to rejoice with them when they rejoice, 
and to suffer and mourn with them when they suffer and 
mourn, in the selfsame measure do we taste the blessedness 
of the promise that we shall inherit the earth. It is not the 
narrow span of our own garden, of our own field, that we 
then enjoy. Our own prosperity does not bound our happi¬ 
ness. That happiness is infinitely multiplied, as we take 
interest in all that befalls our neighbours, and find an ever- 
flowing source of fresh joy in every blessing bestowed on 
every soul around us. a - 

This great Christian truth is beautifully exprest by 
Augustin in his 32d Treatise on St John, when he is 
speaking of the union between the individual Christian and 
the Church. “Quid enim % tu loqueris omnibus linguis ? 
Loquor, plane, quia omnis lingua mea est, id est, ejus corporis 
cujus membrum sum. Diffusa Ecclesia per gentes loquitur 
omnibus linguis : Ecclesia est corpus Christi: in hoc corpore 
membrum es : cum ergo membrum sis ejus corporis quod 
loquitur omnibus linguis, crede te loqui omnibus linguis. 
Unitas enim membrorum caritate concordat; et ipsa unitas 
loquitur quomodo tunc unus homo loquebatur.—Sed tu 
forsitan eorum omnium quae dixi nihil habes. Si amas, non 
nihil habes. Si enim amas unitatem, etiam tibi habet 
quisquis in ilia habet aliquid. Tolle invidiam, et tuum est 
quod habeo : tollam invidiam, et meum est quod habes. 
Livor separat; sanitas jungit. Oculus solus videt in corpore : 
sed numquid soli sibi oculuS videt ? Et manui videt, et pedi 
videt, et caeteris membris videt.—Rursus sola manus operatur 
in corpore : sed numquid sibi soli operatur ? Et oculo 
operatur.—Sic pes ambulando omnibus membris militat; 




234 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


membra caetera tacent, et lingua omnibus loquitur. Habemus 
ergo Spiritum Sanctum, si amamus Ecclesiam.” 

This is the great blessing of marriage, that it delivers us 
from the tyranny of Meum and Tuum. Converting each into 
the other, it endears them both, and turns a slavish, dead¬ 
ening drudgery into a free and joyous service. And by 
bringing home to every one’s heart, that he is something 
better than a mere self, that he is the part of a higher and 
more precious whole, it becomes a type of the union between 
the Church and her Lord. u. 


To Adam Paradise was home. To the good among his 
descendants home is Paradise. 


God’s first gift to man was religion, and a glimpse of 
personal liberty: His second was love, and a home, and 
therein the seeds of civilization. His two great institutions 
are two great charters, bestowed on every creature that 
labours, and on women. Had they been respected as they 
ought, no poor folks would ever have been driven to their 
work like oxen, and trampled down into mere creeping 
things ; nor would any females have been degraded into brute 
instruments for glutting the casual passions of the male. 


In giving us sisters, God gave us the best of earthly moral 
antiseptics ; that affinity, in its habitual, intimate, domestic, 
desensualized intercourse of affection, presenting us with the 
ideal of love in sexual separation ; as marriage, or total iden¬ 
tification, does with the ideal of love in sexual union. Indeed 
it bears the same relation to love, that love bears to human 
nature ; being designed to disentangle love from sense, which 
is love’s selfishness, just as love is to disentangle man from 
selfishness under all its forms. Yet God again has conse¬ 
crated sense in marriage; so that its delights are only called 
in to be purified and minted by religion. If they are for¬ 
bidden to the appetite, it is to raise their character, and to 
endow it with a blessing ; that, being thus elevated, enricht, 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


235 


and hallowed, they may prove the worthier gift to the 
chastened and subjected imagination. 

Here let me cite a passage from one of the wisest and 
most delightful works of recent times, which, though its 
author is sometimes over-fanciful, and not seldom led astray 
by his Romish prejudices, is full of high and holy thoughts 
on the loftiest subjects of speculation. “La passion la 
plus effrenee et la plus chere a la nature humaine verse 
seule plus de maux sur la terre quo tous les autres vices 
ensemble. Nous avons horreur du meurtre : mais que sont 
tous les meurtres reunis, et la guerre meme, compares au 
vice, qui est comme le mauvais principe, homicide des le com¬ 
mencement, qui agit sur le possible, tue ce qui n’existe point 
encore, et ne cesse de veiller sur les sources de la vie pour 
les appauvrir ou les souiller? Comme il doit toujours y 
avoir dans le monde, en vertu de sa constitution actuelle, 
une conspiration immense pour justifier, pour embellir, j’ai 
presque dit, pour consacrer ce vice, il n’y en a pas sur lequel 
les saintes pages aient accumule plus d’anathemes temporels. 
Le sage nous de'nonce les suites funestes des nuits coupables 
(iv. 6); et si nous regardons autour de nous, rien ne nous 
empeche d’observer 1’incontestable accomplissement de ces 
anathemes. La reproduction de l’homme, qui d’un cote le 
rapproche de la brute, leleve de l’autre jusqu’a la pure in¬ 
telligence, par les lois qui environnent ce grand mystere de 
la nature, et par la sublime participation accordee a celui 
qui s’en est rendu digne. Mais que la sanction de ces lois 
est terrible ! Si nous pouvions apercevoir tous les maux qui 
resultent des innombrables profanations de la premiere loi 
du monde, nous reculerions d’horreur. Nos enfans porteront 
la peine de nos fautes : nos peres les ont venges d’avance. 
Voila pourquoi la seule religion vraie est aussi la seule qui, 
sans pouvoir tout dire a l’homme, se soit neanmoins emparee 
du mariage, et l’ait soumis a de saintes ordonnances. Je 
crois meme que sa legislation sur ce point doit etre mise au 
rang des preuves les plus sensibles de sa divinite.” De 
Maistre, Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg, i. 59—61. 





236 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

There are persons who would have us love, or rather obey 
God, chiefly because he outbids the devil. 

I was told once of a man, who lighted a bonfire in his 
park, and walkt through it to get a foretaste of hell, and try 
what it felt like. Surely he who could do this must often 
have been present at scenes which would have fumisht him 
with a better likeness. u. 


Some men treat the God of their fathers as they treat their 
father’s friend. They do not deny him; by no means : they 
only deny themselves to him, when he is good enough to call 
upon them. 


Truth, when witty, is the wittiest of all things. 

Ridentem dicere verum Quid vetat ? In the first place, all 
the sour faces in the world, stiffening into a yet more rigid 
asperity at the least glimpse of a smile. I have seen faces 
too, which, so long as you let them lie in their sleepy torpour, 
unshaken and unstirred, have a creamy softness and smooth¬ 
ness, and might beguile you into suspecting their owners of 
being gentle : but, if they catch the sound of a laugh, it acts 
on them like thunder, and they also turn sour. Nay, strange 
as it may seem, there have been such incarnate paradoxes as 
would rather see their fellowcreatures cry than smile. 

But is not this in exact accordance with the spirit which 
pronounces a blessing on the weeper, and a woe on the 
laugher ? 

Not in the persons I have in view. That blessing and woe 
are pronounced in the knowledge how apt the course of this 
world is to run counter to the kingdom of God. They who 
weep are declared to be blessed, not because they weep, but 
because they shall laugh: and the woe threatened to the 
laughers is in like manner, that they shall mourn and weep. 
Therefore they who have this spirit in them will endeavour 
to forward the blessing, and to avert the woe. They will try 
to comfort the mourner, so as to lead him to rejoice : and 









G [JESSES AT TRUTH. 


237 


they will warn the laugher, that he may be preserved from 
the mourning and weeping, and may exchange his passing for 
lasting joy. But there are many who merely indulge in the 
antipathy, without opening their hearts to the sympathy. 
Such is the spirit found in those who have cast off the bonds 
of the lower earthly affections, without having risen as yet 
into the freedom of heavenly love,—in those who have stopt 
short in the state of transition between the two lives, like so 
many skeletons, stript of their earthly, and not yet clothed 
with a heavenly body. It is the spirit of Stoicism, for 
instance, in philosophy, and of vulgar Calvinism, which in so 
many things answers to Stoicism, in religion. They who feel 
the harm they have received from worldly pleasures, are 
prone at first to quarrel with pleasure of every kind alto¬ 
gether : and it is one of the strange perversities of our self- 
will to entertain anger, instead of pity, toward those whom we 
fancy to judge or act less wisely than ourselves. This how¬ 
ever is only while the scaffolding is still standing around the 
edifice of their Christian life, so that they cannot see clearly 
out of the windows, and their view is broken up into dis¬ 
jointed parts. When the scaffolding is removed, and they 
look abroad without hindrance, they are readier than any to 
delight in all the beauty and true pleasure around them. 
They feel that it is their blessed calling, not only to rejoice 
always themselves, but likewise to rejoice with all who do 
rejoice in innocence of heart. They feel that this must be 
well-pleasing to Him who has filled His universe with ever- 
bubbling springs of gladness; so that, whithersoever we turn 
our eyes, through earth and sky as well as sea, we behold 
the avrjpidyov yeXacr/xa of Nature. On the other hand, it is 
the harshness of an irreligious temper, clothing itself in reli¬ 
gious zeal, and not seldom exhibiting symptoms of mental 
disorganization, that looks scowlingly on every indication of 
happiness and mirth. 

Moreover there is a large class of people, who deem the 
business of life far too weighty and momentous to be made 
light of ; who would leave merriment to children, and laughter 
to idiots; and who hold that a joke would be as much out 







! 

23S GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

of place on their lips, as on a gravestone, or in a ledger. 
Wit and Wisdom being sisters, not only are they afraid of 
being indicted for bigamy were they to wed them both; but 
they shudder at such a union as incestuous. So, to keep 
clear of temptation, and to preserve their faith where they 
have plighted it, they turn the younger out of doors ; and if 
they see or hear of anybody taking her in, they are positive 
he can know nothing of the elder. They would not be witty 
for the world. Now to escape being so is not very difficult 
for those whom Nature has so favoured that Wit with them 
is always at zero, or below it. And as to their Wisdom, 
since they are careful never to overfeed her, she jogs leisurely 
along the turnpike-road, with lank and meagre carcass, dis¬ 
playing all her bones, and never getting out of her own dust. 
She feels no inclination to be frisky, but, if a coach or a 
waggon passes her, is glad, like her rider, to run behind a 
thing so big. Now all these people take grievous offense, if 
any one comes near them better mounted; and they are 
in a tremour lest the neighing and snorting and prancing 
should be contagious. 

Surely however ridicule implies contempt: and so the 
feeling must be condemnable, subversive of gentleness, in¬ 
compatible with kindness 1 

Not necessarily so, or universally: far from it. The 
word ridicule, it is true, has a narrow, onesided meaning. 
From our proneness to mix up personal feelings with 
those which are more purely objective and intellectual, 
we have in great measure restricted the meaning of ridicule, 
which would properly extend over the whole region of the 
ridiculous, the laughable, where we may disport ourselves 
innocently, without any evil emotion; and we have narrowed 
it so that in common usage it mostly corresponds to derision, 
which does indeed involve personal and offensive feelings. 
As the great business of Wisdom in her speculative office is 
to detect and reveal the hidden harmonies of things, those 
harmonies which are the sources and the overflowing emana¬ 
tions of Law, the dealings of Wit on the other hand are 
with incongruities. And it is the perception of incon- 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 23$) 

gniity, flashing upon us, when unaccompanied, as Aristotle 
observes {Poet. c. v), by pain, or by any predominant moral 
disgust, that provokes laughter, and excites the feeling of the 
ridiculous. But it no more follows that the perception of such 
an incongruity must breed or foster haughtiness or disdain, 
than that the perception of anything else that maybe erroneous 
or wrong should do so. You might as well argue, that a man 
must be proud and scornful, because he sees that there is such 
a thing as sin, or such a thing as folly in the world. Yet, 
unless we blind our eyes, and gag our ears, and hoodwink 
our minds, we shall seldom pass through a day, without 
having some form of evil brought in one way or other before 
us. Besides the perception of incongruity may exist, and 
may awaken laughter, without the slightest reprobation of 
the object laught at. We laugh at a pun, surely without a 
shade of contempt either for the words punned upon or for 
the punster : and if a very bad pun be the next best thing to 
a very good one, this is not from its flattering any feeling of 
superiority in us, but because the incongruity is broader 
and more glaring. Nor, when we laugh at a droll com¬ 
bination of imagery, do we feel any contempt, but often 
admiration, at the ingenuity shewn in it, and an almost 
affectionate thankfulness toward the person by whom we 
have been amused, such as is rarely excited by any other 
display of intellectual power; as those who have ever 
enjoyed the delight of Professor Sedgwick’s society will bear 
witness. 

It is true, an exclusive attention to the ridiculous side of 
things is hurtful to the character, and destructive of earnest¬ 
ness and gravity. But no less mischievous is it to fix our 
attention exclusively, or even mainly, on the vices and other 
follies of mankind. Such contemplations, unless counter¬ 
acted by wholesomer thoughts, harden or rot the heart, 
deaden the moral principle, and make us hopeless and 
reckless. The objects toward which we should turn our 
minds habitually, are those which are great and good and 
pure, the throne of Virtue, and she who sits upon it, the 
majesty of Truth, the beauty of Holiness. This is the 



240 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

spiritual sky through which we should strive to mount, 
“ springing from crystal step to crystal step,” and bathing 
our souls in its living, life-giving ether. These are the 
thoughts by which we should whet and polish our swords 
for the warfare against evil, that the vapours of the earth 
may not rust them. But in a warfare against evil, under 
one or other of its forms, we are all of us called to engage : 
and it is a childish dream to fancy that we can walk about 
among mankind without perpetual necessity of remarking 
that the wnrld is full of many worse incongruities, beside 
those which make us laugh. 

Nor do I deny that a laugher may often be a scoffer and 
a scorner. Some jesters are fools of a worse breed than 
those who used to wear the cap. Sneering is commonly 
found along with a bitter, splenetic misanthropy : or it may 
be a man’s mockery at his own hollow heart, venting itself 
in mockery at others. Cruelty will try to season, or to 
palliate its atrocities by derision. The hyena grins in its 
den; most wild beasts over their prey. But, though a 
certain kind of wit, like other intellectual gifts, may coexist 
with moral depravity, there has often been a playfulness in 
the best and greatest men,—in Phocion, in Socrates, in 
Luther, in Sir Thomas More,—which, as it were, adds a 
bloom to the severer graces of their character, shining forth 
with amaranthine brightness when storms assail them, and 
springing up in fresh blossoms under the axe of the execu¬ 
tioner. How much is our affection for Hector increast by 
his tossing his boy in his arms, and laughing at his childish 
fears ! Smiles are the language of love : they betoken the 
complacency and delight of the heart in the object of its 
contemplation. Why are we to assume that there must 
needs be bitterness or contempt in them, when they enforce 
a truth, or reprove an errour ? On the contrary, some of 
those who have been richest in wit and humour, have been 
among the simplest and kindest-hearted of men. I will only 
instance Fuller, Bishop Earle, Lafontaine, Mattlies Claudius, 
Charles Lamb. “Le mechant n’est jamais comique,” is 
wisely remarkt by De Maistre, when canvassing the preten- 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 241 

sions of Voltaire {Soirees, i. 273) : and the converse is 
equally true : le comique, le vrai comique, n’est jamais mediant. 

A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart; but 
without kindness there can be no true joy. And what a 
dull, plodding, tramping, clanking would the ordinary inter¬ 
course of society be, without wit to enliven and brighten it! 
When two men meet, they seem to be kept at bay through 
the estranging effects of absence, until some sportive sally 
opens their hearts to each other. Nor does anything spread 
cheerfulness so rapidly over a whole party, or an assembly 
of people, however large. Reason expands the soul of the 1 
philosopher; Imagination glorifies the poet, and breathes a 
breath of spring through the young and genial: but, if we 
take into account the numberless glances and gleams whereby 
Wit lightens our everyday life, I hardly know what power 
ministers so bountifully to the innocent pleasures of mankind. 

Surely too it cannot be requisite to a man’s being in¬ 
earnest, that he should wear a perpetual frown. Or is there 
less of sincerity in Nature during her gambols in spring, 
than during the stiffness and harshness of her wintry gloom % 
Does not the bird’s blithe caroling come from the heart, 
quite as much as the quadruped’s monotonous cry 1 And is 
it then altogether impossible to take up one’s abode with f 
Truth, and to let all sweet homely feelings grow about it and 
cluster around it, and to smile upon it as on a kind father 
or mother, and to sport with it and hold light and merry 
talk with it as with a loved brother or sister, and to fondle 
it and play with it as with a child 1 In this wise did 
Socrates and Plato commune with Truth ; in this wise 
Cervantes and Shakspeare. This playfulness of Truth is 
beautifully represented by Landor, in the Conversation 
between Marcus Cicero and his brother, in an allegory which 
has the voice and the spirit of Plato. On the other hand 
the outcries of those who exclaim against every sound more 
lively than a bray or a bleat, as derogatory to Truth, are 
often prompted, not so much by their deep feeling of the 
dignity of the truth in question, as of the dignity of the 
person by whom that truth is asserted. It is our vanity, 


a 













242 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

our self-conceit, that makes us so sore and irritable. To a 
grave argument we may reply gravely, and fancy that we 
have the best of it : but he who is too dull or too angry to 
smile, cannot answer a smile, except by fretting and fuming ? 
Olivia lets us into the secret of Malvolio’s distaste for the 
Clown. 

For the full expansion of the intellect moreover, to 
preserve it from that narrowness and partial warp, which our 
proneness to give ourselves up to the sway of the moment 
is apt to produce, its various faculties, however opposite, 
should grow and be trained up side by side, should twine their 
arms together, and strengthen each other by love-wrestles. 
Thus will it be best fitted for discerning and acting upon the 
multiplicity of things which the world sets before it. Thus 
too will something like a balance and order be upheld, and 
our minds be preserved from that exaggeration on the one 
side, and depreciation on the other side, which are the sure 
results of exclusiveness. A poet for instance should have 
much of the philosopher in him; not indeed thrusting itself 
forward at the surface,—this would only make a monster of 
his work, like the Siamese twins, neither one thing, nor 
two,—but latent within : the spindle should be out of sight; 
but the web should be spun by the Fates. A philosopher 
on the other hand should have much of the poet in him. 
A historian cannot be great, without combining the elements 
of the two minds. A statesman ought to unite those of all 
the three. A great religious teacher, such as Socrates, 
Bernard, Luther, Schleiermacher, needs the statesman’s 
practical power of dealing with men and things, as well as 
the historian’s insight into their growth and purpose : I 10 
needs the philosopher’s ideas, impregnated and impersonated 
by the imagination of the poet. In like manner our graver 
faculties and thoughts are much chastened and bettered by 
a blending and interfusion of the lighter, so that “ the sable 
cloud ” may “ turn forth her silver lining on the night: ” 
while our lighter thoughts require the graver to substantiate 
them and keep them from evaporating. Thus Socrates is 
said in Plato’s Banquet to have maintained that a great 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


243 


tragic poet ought likewise to be a great comic poet : an 
observation the more remarkable, because the tendency of 
the Greek mind, as at once manifested in their Polytheism, 
and fostered by it, was to insulate all its ideas, and as it 
were to split up the intellectual world into a cluster of 
Cyclades; whereas the appetite for union and fusion, often 
leading to confusion, is the characteristic of modern times. 
The combination however was realized in himself, and in his 
great pupil, and may perhaps have been so to a certain 
extent in Eschylus, if we may judge from the fame of his 
satyric dramas. At all events the assertion, as has been 
remarkt more than once,—for instance by Coleridge (Remains 
ii. 12),—is a wonderful prophetical intuition, which has 
received its fulfilment in Shakspeare. No heart would have 
been strong enough to hold the woe of Lear and Othello, 
except that which had the unquenchable elasticity of Falstaff 
and the Midsummer Night's Dream. He too is an example 
that the perception of the ridiculous does not necessarily 
imply bitterness and scorn. Along with his intense humour, 
and his equally intense, piercing insight into the darkest, 
most fearful depths of human nature, there is still a spirit 
of universal kindness, as well as universal justice, pervading 
his works : and Ben Jonson has left us a precious memorial 
of him, where he calls him “ My gentle Shakspeare.” This 
one epithet sheds a beautiful light on his character : its 
truth is attested by his wisdom ; which could never have 
1 been so perfect, unless it had been harmonized by the 
gentleness of the dove. A similar union of the graver and 
lighter powers is found in several of Shakspeare’s contem¬ 
poraries, and in many others among the greatest poets of 
the modern world; in Boccaccio, in Cervantes, in Chaucer, 
in Goethe, in Tieck : so was it in Walter Scott. 

But He who came to set us an example how we ought to 
walk, never indulged in wit or ridicule, and thereby shewed 
that such levities are not becoming in those who profess to 
follow Him. 

I have heard this argument alledged, but could never feel 
its force. Jesus did indeed set us an example, which it 













244 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


behoves us to follow in all things: we cannot follow it too 
closely, too constantly. It is the spirit of His example 
however, that we are to follow, not the letter. We are to 
endeavour that the principles of our actions may be the 
same which He manifested in His, but not to cleave servilely 
to the outward form. For, as He did many things, which 
we cannot do,—as He had a power and a wisdom, which lie 
altogether beyond our reach,—so are there many things 
which beseem us in our human, earthly relations, but which 
it did not enter into His purpose to sanction by His express 
example. Else on the selfsame grounds it might be con¬ 
tended, that it does not befit a Christian to be a husband or 
a father, seeing that Jesus has set us no example of these 
two sacred relations. It might be contended w T ith equal 
justice, that there ought to be no statesmen, no soldiers, no 
lawyers, no merchants,—that no one should write a book,— 
that poetry, history, philosophy, science, ought all to be 
thrown overboard, and banisht for ever from the field of 
lawful human occupations. As rationally might it be 
argued, that, because there are no trees or houses in the 
sky, it is therefore profane and sinful to plant trees and 
build houses on the earth. Jeremy Taylor, in his Exhorta¬ 
tion to the Imitation of the Life of Christ , when speaking of 
the things which Christ did, but which are not “ imitable by 
us,” touches on this very point (Yol. ii. p. lxvii). “We 
never read (he says) that Jesus laught, and but once that 
He rejoiced in spirit : but the declensions of our natures 
cannot bear the weight of a perpetual grave deportment, 
without the intervals of refreshment and free alacrity.” 

In fact the aim and end of all our Lord’s teaching,—to 
draw men away from sin to the knowledge and love of God, 
—was such, that wit and ridicule, even had they been com¬ 
patible with the pure heavenliness of His spirit, could have 
found no place in it. For the dealings of Wit are with 
incongruities, regarded intellectually, rather than morally,— 
with absurdities and follies, rather than with vices and sins : 
and when it attacks the latter, it tries chiefly to point out 
their absurdity and folly, the moral feeling being for the 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


245 


time kept half in abeyance. But though there is no re¬ 
corded instance of our Lord’s making use of any of the 
weapons of wit,—nor is it conceivable that He ever did so, 

—a severe, taunting irony is sanctioned by the example of 
the Hebrew Prophets,—as in Isaiah’s sublime invective 
against idolatry, and in Elijah’s controversy with the priests 
of Baal,—and by that of St Paul, especially in the fourth 
chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians. Surely too 
one may say with Milton, in his Animadversions on the Re¬ 
monstrant, that “this vein of laughing hath ofttimes a 
strong and sinewy force in teaching and confuting; ” and 
that, “ if it be harmful to be angry, and withal to cast a 
lowering smile, when the properest object calls for both, it 
will be long enough ere any be able to say, why those two 
most rational faculties of human intellect, anger and 
laughter, were first seated in the breast of man.” In like 
manner Schleiermacher, who was gifted with the keenest 
wit, and who was the greatest master of irony since Plato, 
deemed it justifiable and right to make use of these powers, 
as Pascal also did, in his polemical writings. Yet all who 
knew him well declare that the basis of his character, the | 
keynote of his whole being, was love ;—and so, when I had 
the happiness of seeing him, I felt it to be ;—a love which j 
delighted in pouring out the boundless riches of his spirit 
for the edifying of such as came near him, and strove with 
unweariable zeal to make them partakers of all that he had. 
Hereby was his heart kept fresh through the unceasing and 
often turbulent activity of his life, so that the subtilty of 
his understanding had no power to corrode it; but when he 
died, he was still, as one of his friends said of him, einfiinf- 
und-sechzigjdhriger Jungling. To complain of his wit and 
irony, as some do, is like complaining of a sword for being 
sharp. So long as errour and evil passions lift up their 
heads in literature, the soldiers of Truth must go forth 
against them : and seldom will it be practicable to fulfil the 
task imposed upon Shylock, and cut out a noxious opinion, 
especially where there is an inflammable habit, without 
shedding a drop of blood. In fact, would it not be some- 












216 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


thing like a mockery, when we deem it our duty to wage 
battle, were we to shrink from using the weapons which God 
has placed in our hands ? Only we must use them fairly, 
lawfully, for our cause, not for display, still less in mangling 
or wantonly wounding our adversaries. 

After all however I allow that the feeling of the ridiculous 
can only belong to the imperfect conditions and relations of 
humanity. Hence I have always felt a shock of pain, almost 
of disgust, at reading that passage in Paradise Lost, where, 
in reply to Adam’s questions about the stars, Raphael says, 

The Great Architect 
Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge 
His secrets, to be scanned by them who ought 
Rather admire ; or, if they list to try 
Conjecture, He His fabric of the heavens, 

Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move 
His laughter at their quaint opinions wide 
Hereafter. When they come to model heaven, 

And calculate the stars, how they will wield 
The mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive 
To save appearances, how gird the sphere 
With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er, 

Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb,— . 

Already by thy reasoning this I guess. 

Milton might indeed appeal to certain passages in the Old 
Testament, such as Psalm ii. 4, Prov. i. 26 : but the bold 
and terrible anthropopathy of those passages can nowise 
justify a Christian in attributing such a feeling to God; 
least of all as excited by a matter of purely speculative 
science, without any moral pravity. For in the sight of 
God the only folly is wickedness. The errours of His 
creatures, so far as they are merely errours of the under¬ 
standing, are nothing else than the refraction of the light, 
from the atmosphere in which He has placed them. Even 
we can perceive and acknowledge how the aberrations of 
Science are necessary stages in her progress : and an astro¬ 
nomer nowadays would only shew his own ignorance, and his 
incapacity of looking beyond what he sees around him, if he 
were to mock at the Ptolemaic system, or could not discern 
how in its main principles it was the indispensable prelude 
to the Copernican. While the battle is pending, we may 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


247 


attack an inveterate errour with the missiles of ridicule, as 
well as in close fight, reason to reason : but, when the battle 
is won, we are bound to do justice to the truth which lay at 
its heart, and which was the source of its power. In either 
case it is a sort of blasphemy to attribute our puny feelings 
to Him, before whom the difference between the most 
ignorant man and the least ignorant is only that the latter 
has learnt a few more letters in the alphabet of knowledge. 
Above all is it offensive to represent the Creator as pur¬ 
posely throwing an appearance of confusion over His works, 
that He may enjoy the amusement of laughing at the im¬ 
potent attempts of His creatures to understand them. u. 

Nobody who is afraid of laughing, and heartily too, at his 
friend, can be said to have a true and thorough love for him : 
and on the other hand it would betray a sorry want of faith, 
to distrust a friend because he laughs at you. Few men, I 
believe, are much worth loving, in whom there is not some¬ 
thing well worth laughing at. That frailty, without some 
symptoms of which man has never been found, and which in 
the bad forms the gangrene for their vices to rankle and 
fester in, shews itself also in the best men, and attaches 
itself even to their virtues. Only in them it appears mainly 
in occasional awkwardnesses and waywardnesses, in their 
falling short or stepping aside now and then, rather than 
in their absolute abandonment of the path of duty. It is 
the earthly particle which tints the colourless ray, and 
without which that ray is no object of human vision. It 
gives them their determinate features and characteristic 
expression, constituting them real persons, instead of mere 
personified ideas. This too is the very thing that enables us 
to sympathize with them as with our brethren, under deeper 
and gentler feelings than those of a stargazing wonder. Now 
this incongruity and incompleteness, this contrast between 
the pure, spiritual principle and the manner and form of its 
actual manifestation, contain the essence of the ridiculous. 
The discord, coming athwart the tune, and blending with it, 
when not harsh enough to be painful, is ludicrous. 













243 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

At times too the very majesty of a principle will make, 
what in another case would scarcely have attracted notice, 
appear extravagant. The higher a tree rises, the wider is 
the range of its oscillations : and thus it comes to pass that 
there is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous. Nor 
is it merely that the effect is deepened by the contrast. 
There is ever a Socratic playfulness in true magnanimity; 
so that, feeling the inadequateness of all earthly raiment,— 
finding too that, even when it comes to its home, it must 
come as a stranger and an alien,—it is not unwilling to 
clothe itself, like the godlike Ulysses, in rags. At nothing 
else can one laugh with such goodwill, and at the same time 
with such innocence and good-humour. Nor can any laugh 
be freer from that contempt, which has so erroneously been 
supposed to be involved in the feeling of the ridiculous. 
The stedfast assurance and unshakable loyalty of love are 
evinced, not in blinking and looking aside from the object 
we profess to regard, and leering on some imaginary coun¬ 
terfeit, some puppet of our own fancies, trickt out in such 
excellences as our gracious caprice may bestow on it; but in 
gazing fixedly at our friend such as he is, admiring what is 
great in him, approving what is good, delighting in what is 
amiable, and retaining our admiration and approbation and 
delight unsullied and unimpaired, at the very moment when 
we are vividly conscious that he is still but a man, and has 
something in him of human weakness, something of whim¬ 
sical peculiarity, or something of disproportionate en¬ 
thusiasm. rT 


Every age has its besetting sins; every condition its 
attendant evils f every state of society its diseases, that it is 
especially liable to be attackt by. One of the pests which 
dog Civilization, the more so the further it advances, is the 
fear of ridicule : and seldom has the contagion been so 
noxious as in England at this day. Is there anybody living, 
among the upper classes at least, who has not often been 
laught out of what he ought to have done, and laught into 
what he ought not to have done ? Who has not sinned i 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


2 49 


who has not been a runagate from duty % who has not stifled 
his best feelings ? who has not mortified his noblest desires ? 
solely to escape being laught at ? and not once merely; but 
time after time ; until that which has so often been checkt, 
becomes stunted, and no longer dares lift up its head. And 
then, after having been laught down ourselves, we too join 
the pack who go about laughing down others. 

The robbers and monsters of the olden times no longer 
infest the world : but the race of scoffers have jumpt into 
their shoes. Your silver and gold you may carry about 
you securely : of your genius and virtue the best part must 
be lockt up out of sight. For the man of the world is the 
Procrustes, who lays down his bed across the highroad, and 
binds all passers-by to it. To fall short of it indeed is 
scarcely possible ; and so none need fear being pulled out; 
but whatever transgresses its limits is cut off without mercy. 
One of these beds, of a newly invented kind, set up mainly 
for authors, has blue curtains with yellow trimmings * the 
drapery of a second is of a dingy, watery mud-colour: for 
in this respect Procrustes has grown more refined with the 
age : his bed has got curtains. Unfortunately there is no 
Theseus to rid us of him : and the hearts of the rabble are 
with him, and lift up a shout as every new victim falls into 
his clutches. Nor do the direct outrages committed by such 
men make up the whole of their mischief. Their baneful 
influence spreads far more widely. Doing no good to those 
whom they attack, but merely maiming or irritating them, 
they at the same time check and frighten others; and delude- 
and warp the judgement, while they pamper the malignant, 
passions of the multitude. 

But do not these evils amply justify a sentence of trans¬ 
portation for life against jesting and ridicule % and would it 
not be well if we could banish our wits to grin amuck with 
savages and monkies ? 

By no means. If people would discern and distinguish, 
instead of confusing and confounding, they would see that 
the best way of putting down the abuse of a thing, is to 
make it useful. Would you lop off everybody’s hands, 










250 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

because they might be turned to picking and stealing? 
Neither is the intellect to be shorn of any of its members ; 
seeing that, though they may all be perverted, they may all 
minister to good. The busy have no time to be fidgety. 
He who is following his plough, will not be breaking win¬ 
dows with the mob. Little is gained by overthrowing and 
sweeping away an idol, unless you restore the idea, of which 
it is the shell and sediment. Nor will you find any plan so 
effective for keeping folks from doing harm, as teaching them 
to employ their faculties in doing good, and giving them 
plenty of good work to do. u. 

No one stumbles so readily as the blind : no one is so 
easily scandalized as the ignorant; or at least as the half¬ 
knowing, as those who have just taken a bite at the apple of 
knowledge, and got a smattering of evil, without an inkling 
of good. 

But are we not to beware lest we offend any of these little 
j ones ? 

Assuredly : we are to beware of it from love ; or, if love 
cannot constrain us, from fear. No wise man, as was remarkt 
above (p. 157), will offend the -weak, in that which pertains 
to their faith. For this is a portion of the offense condemned 
in the Gospel: it is offending the little ones who believe in 
Christ. In the whole too of his direct intercourse with 
others, the wise man’s principle will be the same : for he will 
be desirous of instructing, not of imposing, and, that he may 
be able to teach, will try to conciliate. Thus will he act, 
after the example of him, in whom, above all men, we behold 
the conscious self-abasement and reasonable self-sacrifice of 
the loftiest and mightiest intellect, the Apostle Paul. Like 
St Paul, every w T ise man will to the weak become as weak, 
that he may gain the weak : like him he will be made all 
things to all men;—not in that worldly spirit which is made 
all things to all men for its own ends,—but in order that he 
may by whatsoever means benefit some. He who wishes to 
edify, does not erect a column, as it were a gigantic I, a huge 
mark of admiration at himself, within which none can find 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


231 


.shelter, and which contains nothing beyond a stair to mount 
through it. He will build the lowly cottage for the lowly, 
as well as the lordly castle for the lordly, and the princely 
palace for the princely, and the holy church for the holy. 
Or, if to effect all this surpass the feebleness of a single indi¬ 
vidual, he will do what he can. He will lay out and garnish 
such a banquet as his means enable him to provide; taking 
care indeed that no dish, which in itself is poisonous or 
unwholesome, be set on his table : and so long as he does 
not invite those who are likely to be disgusted or made sick, 
he is nowise to blame, if they choose to intrude among his 
guests, and to disgust themselves. When they find them¬ 
selves out of their places, let them withdraw : the meek will. 
A man’s servants complained of his feeding them on salmon 
and venison : the inhabitants of Terra del Fuego did not 
like bread or wine : reason enough for not forcing what they 
disliked down their throats : but no reason at all for not 
giving bread and wine to a European, or for not placing 
salmon and venison before such as relish them. 

They who would have no milk for babes, are in the wrong. 
They who would have no strong meat for strong men, are not 
in the right. u. 

Neither the ascetics, nor the intolerant antiascetics, seem 
to be aware that the austere Baptist and the social Jesus are 
merely opposite sides of the same tapestry. 

It is a strange way of shewing our humble reverence and 
love for the Creator, to be perpetually condemning and 
reviling everything that He has created. Were you to tell 
a poet that his poems are detestable, would he thank you for 
the compliment 1 The evil on which it behoves us to fix our 
eyes, is that within ourselves, of our own begetting ; the good, 

! without. The half religious are apt just to reverse this. u. 

If the Bible be, what it professes, a publisht code of duty, 
conventional morality at best consists only of man’s conjec- 
| tural emendations. Generally they are mere fingermarks. 

L_ — z _ 


















252 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


The difference between man’s law and God’s law is, that, 
whereas we may reach the highest standard set before us by 
the former, the more we advance in striving to fulfill the 
latter, the higher it keeps on rising above us. a. 

When a man is told that the whole of Religion and Mora¬ 
lity is summed up in the two commandments, to love God, 
and to love our neighbour, he is ready to cry, like Charoba in 
Gebir, at the first sight of the sea, Is this the mighty ocean ? 
is this all ? Yes ! all: but how small a part of it do your 
eyes survey ! Only trust yourself to it; lanch out upon 
it; sail abroad over it: you will find it has no end : it will 
carry you round the world. u. 

He who looks upon religion as an antidote, may soon grow 
to deem it an anodyne : and then he will not have far to 
sink, before he takes to swallowing it as an opiate, or, it may 
be, to swilling it as a dram. u. 

The only way of setting the Will free is to deliver it from 
wilfulness. u* 


Nothing in the world is lawless, except a slave. 


What hypocrites we seem to be, whenever we talk of 
ourselves ! Our words sound so humble, while our hearts 
are so proud. a. 

Many men are fond of displaying their fortitude in bearing 
pain. But I never saw any one courting blame, to shew how 
well he can stand it. They who do speak ill of themselves, 
do so mostly as the surest way of shewing how modest and 
candid they are. u. 


There are persons who would lie prostrate ou the ground, 
if their vanity or their pride did not hold them up. u. 


How coarse is our use of words ! of such at least as belong 

















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


253 


to spiritual matters. Pride and Vanity are for ever spoken 
of side by side ; and many suppose that they are merely 
different shades of the same feeling. Yet, so far are they 
from being akin, they can hardly find room in the same 
breast. A proud man will not stoop to be vain : a vain 
man is so busy in bowing and wriggling to catch fair 
words from others, that he can never lift up his head into 
pride. 


Pride in former ages may have been held in too good 
repute : Vanity is so now. Pride, which is the fault of 
greatness and strength, is sneered at and abhorred: to Vanity, 
the froth and consummation of weakness, every indulgence 
is shewn. For Pride stands aloof by itself; and that we are 
- i too mob-like to bear : Vanity is unable to stand, except by 
leaning on others, and is careful therefore of giving offense; 
nay, is ready to fawn on those by whom it hopes to be fed. 
This is one of the main errours in Miss Edgeworth’s views 
on education, that she is not only indulgent to Vanity, but 
almost encourages and fosters it : and this errour renders 
her books for children mischievous, notwithstanding her 
strong sense, and her familiarity with their habits and 
thoughts. Indeed this is the tendency of all our modern 
education. Of old it was deemed the first business of 
education to inculcate humility and obedience : nowadays 
its effect, and not seldom its avowed object, is to inspire 
selfconceit and selfwill.—1836. u. 

In the Bible the body is said to be more than raiment. 
But many people still read the Bible Hebrew-wise, back¬ 
ward : and thus the general conviction now is that raiment 
is more than the body. There is so much to gaze and stare 
at in the dress, one’s eyes are quite dazzled and weary, and 
can hardly pierce through to that which is clothed upon. So 
too is it with the mind and heart, scarcely less than with the 
body. a. 


A newborn child may be like a person carried into a 











254 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


forein land, where everything is strange to him, manners, 
customs, sentiments, language. Such a person, how¬ 
ever old, would have all these things to learn, just like 
a child. _ 

The religious are often charged with judging uncharitably 
of others : and perhaps the charge may at times be deserved. 
With our narrow, partial views, it is very difficult to feel the 
evil of an errour strongly, and yet to think kindly of him in 
whom we see it. «• 


Man’s first word is Yes; his second, No; his third and 
last, Yes. Most stop short at the first : very few get to the 
last. _ . u. 

Who are the most godlike of men 1 The question might 
be a puzzling one, unless our language answered it for us : 
the godliest. u. 

What is the use of the lower orders % 

To plough . . and to dig in one’s garden . . and to rub 
down one’s horses . . and to feed one’s pigs . . and to black 
one’s shoes . . and to wait upon one. 

Nothing else % 

0 yes! to be laught at in a novel, or in a droll Dutch 
picture . . and to be cried at in Wilkie, or in a sentimental 
story. 

Is that all % 

Why ! yes . . no . . what else oan they be good for % except 
to go to church. 

’ Ay ! that is well thought of. That must be the meaning 
of the words, Blessed are the poor : for theirs is the Kingdom 
of God. u. 

At first sight there seems to be a discrepancy between the 
two statements of the first beatitude given by St Matthew 
and by St Luke (v. 3. vi. 20). But the experience of mis¬ 
sionaries in all ages and countries has reconciled them, and 















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 255 

has shewn that the Kingdom of Heaven is indeed the 
Kingdom both of the poor in spirit and of the poor. u. 

Religion presents few difficulties to the humble, many to 
the proud, insuperable ones to the vain. a. 

There are two worlds, that of the telescope, and that of 
the microscope; neither of which can we see with the 
unassisted natural eye. o. l. 

Surely Shakspeare must have had a prophetic vision of 
the nineteenth century, when he threw off that exquisite 
description of “ purblind Argus, all eyes, and no sight.” u. 

Some people seem to look upon priests as smuglers, who 
bring in contraband goods from heaven : and so a company, 
who call themselves philosophers, go out on the preventive 
service. u. 

Ajax ought to be the hero of all philosophers. His prayer 
should be theirs : ’Ey de (pdei ical oXeacroy. u. 


It has been a matter of argument, whether Poetry or 
History is the truer. 

Has it? Who could ever feel a doubt on the point? 
History tells us everything that has really happened: 
whereas Poetry deals only with fictions, as they are called ; 
that is, in plain English, with lies. 

Gently ! gently ! Very few histories tell us what has really 
happened. They tell us what somebody or other once con¬ 
ceived to have happened, somebody liable to all the infirmities, 
physical, intellectual, and moral, by which man’s judgement 
is distorted. Even this seldom comes to us except at third 
or fourth, or, it may be, at twentieth hand; and a tale, we 
know, is sure to get a new coat of paint from every successive 
tenant. Often too they merely tell us what the writer is 
pleased to think about such a tale, or about half a dozen or 
a dozen of them that pull each other to pieces. 











256 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

Then all histories must be good for nothing. 

Softly again ! There is no better sport than jumping at 
a conclusion : but it is prudent to look a while before you 
leap ; for the ground has a trick of giving way. Many 
histories, or, if you like a bigger word, we will say most, are 
worth very little. Some are only fagots of dry sticks, chopt 
from trees of divers kinds, and bundled up together. Others 
are baskets of fruit, over-ripe and half-ripe, chiefly windfalls, 
crammed in without a leaf to part them, and pressing against 
and mashing one another. Others again are mere bags of 
soot swept down from the chimney through which the fire of 
human action once blazed. Still there are histories the 
! worth of which is beyond estimation. Almost all autobio¬ 
graphies have a value scarcely inferior to their interest; not 
only wdiere the author has Stilling’s simple naivety, or 
Goethe’s clearsighted, Socratic irony, and power of repre¬ 
senting every object with the hues and spirit of life ; but even 
where his vanity stings him to make himself out a prodigy 
of talents, like Cellini, or a prodigy of worthlessness, like 
Rousseau. Other biographies, in proportion as they approach 
to the character of autobiography, when they are written by 
those who loved and were familiar with their subjects, who 
had an eye for the tokens of individual character, and could 
pick up the words as they dropt from living lips, are whole¬ 
some and nourishing reading. There is much that is beautiful 
in Walton’s Lives, though mixt with a good deal of gossip ; 
and few books so refresh and lift up one’s heart, as the Life 
of Oberlin, Lucy Hutchinson’s of her husband, and Roper’s 
of Sir Thomas More. Memoirs too, such as Xenophon’s and 
Cesar’s, those of Frederic the Great, of Sir William Temple, 
and many others, in which the author relates the part he 
himself took in public life, and the affairs he was directly 
concerned in, contain much instructive information, more 
especially for those who follow a like calling. The richness 
of the French in memoirs, arising from their social spirit, 
has tended much to foster and cultivate that spirit, and 
schooled and trained them to that diplomatic skill, for which 
they have so long been celebrated. Still more precious is 
















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 257 

the story of his own time recorded by a statesman, who has 
trod the field of political action, and has stood near the 
source of events, and lookt into it, when he has indeed a 
statesman’s discernment, and knows how men act, and why. 
Such are the great works of Clarendon, of Tacitus, of Poly¬ 
bius, above all, of Thucydides. The latter has hitherto 
been, and is likely to continue unequaled. For the sphere 
of History since his time has been so manifoldly enlarged, it 
is scarcely possible now for any one mind to circumnavigate 
it. Besides the more fastidious nicety of modern manners 
shrinks from that naked exposure of the character as well as 
of the limbs, which the ruder ancients took no offense at : 
and machinery is scarcely doing less towards superseding 
personal energy in politics and war, than in our manufac¬ 
tures ; so that history may come ere long to be written 
without mention of a name. In Thucydides too, and in 
him alone, there is that union of the poet with the philo¬ 
sopher, which is essential to form a perfect historian. He 
has the imaginative plastic power, which makes events pass 
in living array before us, combined with a profound reflective 
insight into their causes and laws ; and all his other faculties 
are under the dominion of the most penetrative practical 
understanding. 

Well then ! good history after all is truer than that 

lying . . . 

I must again stop you, recommending you in future, when 
the wind changes, to tack like a skilful seaman, not to veer 
round like a weathercock. The latter is too commonly the 
practice of those who are beginning to generalize. They are 
determined to point at something, and care little at what. 
When you have more experience, you will find out that 
general propositions, like the wind, are very useful to those 
who trim their sails by them, but of no use at all to those 
who point at them : the former go on ; the latter go round. 
Thucydides, true and profound as he is, cannot be truer or 
profounder than his contemporary, Sophocles ; whom, as well 
in these qualities, as in the whole tone of his genius and even 
of his style, he strongly resembles: he cannot be truer or 




258 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


more profound than Shakspeare. So Herodotus is not more 
true than Homer, and scarcely less : nor would Froissart 
yield the palm to Chaucer; nor take it from him. You 
might fairly match Euripides against Xenophon, barring his 
Anabasis : and Livy, like Virgil, would be distanced, were 
truth to be the winning-post : at least, if he came in first, it 
would be as the greater poet. To draw nearer home, Gold¬ 
smith’s poems, even without reckoning the best of them, his 
inimitable Vicar, are truer than his Histories : so, beyond 
comparison, are Smollett’s novels than his; and Walter 
Scott’s than his ; and Voltaire’s tales than his. Nothing, I 
grant, can well be truer than Defoe’s History of the Plague ; 
unless it be his Robinson Crusoe. Machiavel indeed found 
better play for his serpentine wisdom in the intrigues of 
public than of private life ; just as one would rather see a 
boa coil round a tiger than round a cat. But while Schiller’s 
Wallenstein carries us amid the real struggles of the Thirty 
Years War, in his History it is more like a shamfight at a 
review. As to your favorite, Hume, he wrote no novels or 
tales that I know of, except his Essays ; and full of fiction 
and truthless as they are, they are hardly more so than his 
History. 

What do you mean? History, good history at least, 
Thucydides, if you choose, tells us facts; and ilothing can 
be so true as a fact. 

Did you never hear a story told two ways ? 

Yes, a score of ways. 

Were they all true 1 

Probably not one of them. 

There may be accounts of facts then, which are not true. 

To be sure, when people tell lies. 

Often, very often, without. There is not half the false¬ 
hood in the world that the falsehearted fancy; much as there 
may be ; and greatly as the quantity is increast by suspicion, 
scratching, as it always does, round every sore place. Three 
fourths of the misstatements and misrepresentations that we 
hear, have a different origin. In a number, perhaps the 
majority of instances, the feelings of the relater give a tinge 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 259 

to what he sees, which his understanding is not free and 
selfpossest enough to rub off. Manifold discrepancies will 
arise from differences in the perceptive powers of the organs 
by which the object was observed ; whether those differences 
be natural, or result from cultivation, or from peculiar habits 
of thought. Very often people cannot help seeing diversely, 
because they are not looking from the same point of view. 
One man may see a full face ; another, a profile ; another, 
merely the back of the head. Let each describe what he 
has seen : the accounts will differ entirely : are they there¬ 
fore false ? The cloud, which Hamlet, in bitter mockery at 
his own weakness and vacillation, points out to Polonius, is 
at one moment a camel, the next a weasel, the third a whale : 
just so is it with those vapoury, cloudlike, changeface things, 
which we call facts. The selfsame action may to one man’s 
eyes appear patient and beneficent, to another man crafty 
and selfish, to a third stupid and porpoise-like. Nay, the 
same man may often find his view of it alter, as he beholds 
it in a fainter or fuller light, displaying less or more of its 
motives and character. But would you not like to take 
another turn round? Every fact, you say, if correctly 
stated, is a truth. 

Of course : it is only another word for the same thing. 

Rather would I assert that a fact cannot be a truth. 

You will not easily persuade me of that. 

I do not want to persuade you of anything, except to 
follow the legitimate dictates of your own reason. I would 
convince you, or rather help you to convince yourself, that a 
fact is merely the outward form and sign of a truth, its 
visible image and body; and that, of itself and by itself, it 
can no more be a truth, than a body by itself is a man: 
although common opinion in the former case, and common 
parlance in the latter, has trodden down the distinction. 

I will not dispute this. But in the account of a fact or an 
aetion I include a full exposition of its causes and motives. 

It has been said of some books richly garnisht with notes, 
that the sauce is worth more than the fish : which with 
regard to the Pursuits of Literature may be true, yet the 


s 2 




260 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

sauce be insipid enough. In like manner would your stuffing 
seem to be worth a good deal more than your bird. This is 
the very point where I wish to see you. A historian then 
has something else to do, beside relating naked facts : a file 
of newspapers would not be a history. He has to unfold 
the origin of events, and their connexion, to shew how they 
hook and are linkt into the “ never-ending, still-beginning ” 
chain of causes and consequences, and to carry them home 
to their birthplace among the ever-multiplying family of 
Fate. It was the consciousness of this that led the Father 
of History to preface his account of the wars between the 
Greeks and Persians with the fables of the reciprocal outrages 
committed by the Asiatics and Europeans in the mythical 
ages, and to begin his continuous narrative with the attack 
of the Lydians on the Ionians. Moreover, as the theme of 
History is human actions; for physical occurrences, except 
so far as they exercise an influence on man, belong to 
Natural History or to Science;—the events, I say, which 
a historian has to relate, being brought about by the agency 
of man, he has not merely to represent them in their 
maturity and completion, as actually taking place, but as 
growing in great measure out of the character of the actors, 
and having their form and complexion determined thereby. 
So that human character, as modifying and modified by cir¬ 
cumstances, man controlling and controlled by events, must 
be the historian’s ultimate object. Having to represent the 
actions of men, he can only do this effectively, and so as to 
awaken an interest and fellowfeeling, by representing men in 
action. Now this is the first object of the poet : he starts, 
where the historian ends. 

But the historian’s facts are true ; the poet’s are acknow- 
ledgedly fictitious. When I have read Herodotus, I know 
for certain that Xerxes invaded Greece : after reading; 
Homer, I am left in doubt whether Agamemnon ever sailed 
against Troy. 

And what are you the wiser for being certain of the former 
fact 1 or what the less wise for being left in doubt as to the 
latter ? Your mind may be more or less complete as a 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 261 

chronological table : but that is all. The human, the truly 
philosophical interest in the two stories is much the same, 
whether the swords were actually drawn, and the blood shed, 
or no. Or do you think you should be wiser still, could you 
tell who forged the swords, and from what mine the metal 
came, and w T ho dug it up ? and then again, who made the 
spades used in the digging, and so on ? or how many ounces 
of blood were shed, and how many corpses were strewn on 
the plain, and what crops they fattened, and by what birds 
they were devoured, and by what winds their bones were 
bleacht ! Much information at all events you learn from 
Homer, of the most trustworthy and valuable kind, the 
knowledge of his age, of its manners, arts, institutions, 
habits, its feelings, its spirit, and its faith. Indeed with few 
ages are we equally familiar : where we are, we must draw 
our familiarity from other sources beside history. Nay, 
assume that the facts of the Iliad never took place, that 
Agamemnon and Achilles and Ajax and Ulysses and Diomede 
and Helen were never born of woman, nor ever lived a 
life of flesh and blood, yet assuredly they did live a higher 
and more enduring and mightier life in the hearts and minds 
of their countrymen. So it has been questioned of late years 
whether William Tell actually did shoot the apple on his 
boy’s head; because a similar story is found among the 
fables of other countries. I cannot now examine the grounds 
on which that doubt has been raised : but be they what they 
may, travel through Switzerland, and you will see that the 
story of Tell is true; for it lives in the heart of every Swiss, 
high and low, young and old, learned and simple. A repre¬ 
sentation of it is to be found, or was so till lately, in every 
marketplace, almost in every house : and many a boy has 
had the love of his country, and the resolution to live and 
die for her freedom, kindled in him by the thought of Tell’s 
boy ; many a father, when his eyes were resting on his own 
children, has blest him who delivered them from the yoke of 
the stranger, and from the possibility of being exposed to 
such a fearful trial, and has said to himself, Yes . . I too 
would do as he did. The true knowledge to be learnt, 




262 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

whether from Poetry or from History, the knowledge of real 
importance to man for the study of his own nature, the 
knowledge which may give him an insight into the sources 
of his weakness and of his strength, and which may teach 
him how to act upon himself and upon others,—is the know¬ 
ledge of the principles and the passions by which men in 
various ages have been agitated and swayed, and by which 
events have been brought about ; or by which they might 
have been brought about, if they were not. Thus in other 
sciences it matters little whether any particular phenomena 
were witnest on such a day at such a place ; provided we 
have made out the principles they result from, and the laws 
which regulate them. 

Yet how can a poet teach us this with anything like the 
same certainty as a historian 1 

Just as a chemist may illustrate the operations of Nature 
by an experiment of his own devising, with greater clearness 
and precision than any outward appearances will allow of. 
The poet has his principles of human nature, which he is to 
embody and impersonate ; for to deny his having a mind 
stored with such principles, is to deny his being a poet. The 
historian on the other hand has his facts, which he is to set 
in order and to animate. The first has the foot to measure 
and make a shoe for : the latter has a ready-made shoe, and 
must hunt for a foot to put into it. Which shoe is the 
likeliest to fit well h 

That made on purpose for the foot, if the fellow knows 
anything of his craft. 

Doubtless. But in so saying you have yielded the very 
point we have been arguing % You have even admitted more 
than the equality I pleaded for : you say, the poet is more 
likely to bring his works into harmony with the principles of 
human nature than the historian. I believe you are right. 
An illustration from a kindred art may throw some light on 
our path. A portrait-painter has all the advantages a his¬ 
torian can have, with a task incomparably less arduous ; his 
subject being so definite, and of such narrow compass : 
whereas a poet is in much the same condition with a person 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 263 

drawing a head for what is not very aptly termed a histo?'ical 
picture : the adjective ideal, or imaginative, or poetical, would 
more fitly describe it. In the former case the artist has the 
features set before him, and is to breathe life and charac¬ 
teristic expression into them; a life which shall have the 
calm of permanence, not the fitful flush of the moment; an 
expression which shall exhibit the entire and enduring cha¬ 
racter, not the casual predominance of any one temporary 
feeling. Hereby, as well as by the absence of that com¬ 
placency with which people are wont to contemplate their 
own features, and of the effort to put on their sweetest faces, 
which is not unnatural when their own eyes are to feast on 
them, ought a portrait to be distinguisht from an image 
in a glass. Yet, notwithstanding the facilities which the 
portrait-painter has, when compared with a historian, or 
even a biographer, how few have accomplisht anything like 
what I have been speaking of! in how few of their works 
have the very best painters come quite up to it! Raphael 
indeed has always; Holbein, Titian, Velasquez, Rubens, 
Rembrandt, often; and a few others of the greatest painters 
now and then. But a head, which is at once an ideal and a 
real head, that is, in which the features, while they have the 
vividness and distinctness of actual life, are at the same time 
correct exponents and symbols of character, will more fre¬ 
quently be met with in a poetical picture. As to a historical 
picture, rightly deserving of that name,—a picture repre¬ 
senting a historical event, with the persons who actually took 
part in it,—such a work seems almost to have been regarded 
as hopeless. When anything of the sort has been attempted, 
it has been rather as a historical document, than for any 
purpose of art : and the result has been little else than a 
collection of portraits; which is no more a historical picture, 
than a biographical dictionary is a history. 

Is it not notorious however, that historical, or poetical 
painters, as you call them, are for ever introducing living- 
persons ? 

Yes : the greatest have done so. Raphael whose heart 
was the home of every gentle affection, has left many records 



264 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


of his love for his master, and for his friend Pinturicchio, by 
painting himself along with them among the subordinate 
characters or lookers-on. The Fornarina too seems to have 
furnisht the type for the head of the mother in the Trans¬ 
figuration, and perhaps for other heads in other pictures. 
When he makes use of a living head however, in repre¬ 
senting one of his dramatical or poetical personages, he does 
not set it on the canvas, as Rubens through poverty of 
imagination is wont to do, in its bare outward reality, but 
idealizes it. He takes its general form and outlines, and 
animates it with the character and feelings which he wishes 
to express, purifying it from whatever is at variance with 
them. Or rather perhaps, when he was embodying his idea, 
he almost unconsciously drew a likeness of the features on 
wdiich he loved to gaze. In fact no painter, however great 
his genius or inventive power may be, will neglect the study 
of living subjects, and content himself with poring over the 
phantoms of his imagination, or the puppets of his theory; 
any more than a poet will turn away from the world of history 
and of actual life. For the painter’s business is not to pro¬ 
duce a new creature of his own, but to reproduce that which 
Nature produces now and then in her happiest moments, to 
give permanence to the rapture of transient inspiration, and 
unity and entireness to what in real life is always more or less 
disturbed by marks of earthly frailty, and by the intrusion of 
extraneous, if not uncongenial and contradictory elements. 
You know the story of Leonardo,—who himself wrote a 
theoretical treatise on Painting,—how he is said to have sat 
in the market-place at Milan, looking out for heads to bring 
into his picture of the Last Supper. Hence, as Goethe 
observes (Yol. xxxix. p. 124), we may understand how he | 
might be sixteen years at his work, yet neither finish the 
Saviour nor the Traitor. For it is a difficulty which presses 
on all such as have ever made a venture into the higher 
regions of thought, to discover anything like answerable 
realities,—to atone their ideas with their perceptions : and 
the difficulty is much enhanced, when we are not allowed to 
deal freely with such materials as our senses supply, but 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 2G5 

have to bring down our thoughts to a kind of forced wedlock 
with some one thing just as it is. This is the meaning of 
what Raphael says with such delightful simplicity in his 
letter to Castiglione : Essendo carestia di belle donne , io mi 
servo di certa idea che mi viene alia mente. 

There is something too in the immediate presence of an 
outward reality, which in a manner overawes the mind, so 
as to hinder the free play of its speculative and imaginative 
powers. We cannot at such a moment separate that which 
is essential in an object, from that which is merely accidental, 
the permanent from the transitory : nor, as we were made 
for action far more than for contemplation, is it desirable that 
we should do so. That which strikes us at sight must needs 
be that which comes forward the most prominently. This 
however can by no means be relied on as characteristic; least 
of all in the actions of men, who have learnt the arts of 
clothing and masking their souls as well as their bodies. 
Besides we may easily be too near a thing to see it in its 
unity and totality : and unless we see it as a whole, we cannot 
discern the proportion and importance and purpose of its 
parts. Yet there before us the object stands : the spell of 
reality is upon us : it is, we know not what : we only know 
that it is, and that there is something in it which to us is a 
mystery. We cannot enter into it, to look what is stirring 
and working at its heart : we cannot unfold and anatomize 
it : our senses like leadingstrings, half uphold and guide, 
half check and pull in our understandings. If what we see 
were only different from what it is, then we could understand 
it. But it is obstinate, stubborn, changeless, and will not 
bend to our will. So w r e are fain to let it remain as it is, 
half felt, half understood, with roots diving down out of 
sight, and branches losing themselves among the tops of the 
neighbouring trees. Thus, whenever reality comes athwart 
our minds, they are sure to suffer more or less of an eclipse. 
We must get out of the shadow of an object to see it : we 
must recede from it, to comprehend it: we must compare 
the present with all our past impressions, to make out the 
truth common to them all. When one calls to mind how 










2G6 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

hard it is, to think oneself into a thing, and to think its 
central thought out of it, one is little surprised that Lavater, 
who on such a point must be allowed to have a voice, should 
say in a letter to Jacobi, “ I hold it to be quite impossible 
for any man of originality to be painted. I am a lover of 
portraits; and yet there is nothing I hate so much as 
portraits.” 

You cannot need that I should point out to you how all 
these difficulties are magnified and multiplied in history. 
The field of operation is so vast and unsurveyable ; so much 
of it lies wrapt up in thick, impenetrable darkness, while 
other portions are obscured by the mists which the passions 
of men have spread over them, and a spot here and there 
shines out dazzlingly, throwing the adjacent parts into shade ; 
the events are so inextricably intertwisted and conglomerated, 
sometimes thrown together in a heap,—often rushing onward 
and spreading out like the Rhine, until they lose themselves 
in a morass,—and now and then, after having disappeared, 
rising up again, as was fabled of the Alpheus, in a distant 
region, which they reach through an unseen channel; the 
peaks, which first meet our eyes, are mostly so barren, while 
the fertilizing waters flow secretly through the vallies ; the 
statements of events, as we have already seen, are so per¬ 
petually at variance, and not seldom irreconcilably contra¬ 
dictory ; the actors on the ever-shifting stage are so numerous 
and promiscuous; so many indistinguishable passions, so 
many tangled opinions, so many mazy prejudices, are ever at 
work, rolling and tossing to and fro in a sleepless conflict, in 
which every man’s hand and heart seem to be against his 
neighbour, and often against himself; it is so impossible to 
discern and separate the effects brought about by man’s will 
and energy, from those which are the result of outward 
causes, of circumstances, of conjunctures, of all the myste¬ 
rious agencies summed up under the name of chance ; and 
it requires so much faith, as well as wisdom, to trace anything 
like a pervading, overruling law through the chaos of human 
affairs, and to perceive how the banner which God has set 
up, is still borne pauselessly onward, even while the multi- 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


267 


tudinous host seems to be straggling waywardly, busied in 
petty bickerings and personal squabbles ; that a perfect, con¬ 
summate history of the world may not unreasonably be 
deemed the loftiest achievement that the mind of man can 
contemplate; although no one able to take the measure of 
his own spiritual stature will dream that it could ever be 
accomplisht, except by an intellect far more penetrative and 
comprehensive than man’s. No mortal eye can embrace the 
whole earth, or more than a very small part of it. 

Indeed how could it be otherwise ? Seeing that the 
history of the world is one of God’s own great poems, how 
can any man aspire to do more than recite a few brief 
passages from it 1 This is what man’s poems are, the best 
of them. The same principles and laws, which sway the 
destinies of nations, and of the whole human race, are exhi¬ 
bited in them on a lower scale, and within a narrower sphere; 
where their influence is more easily discernible, and may be 
brought out more singly and palpably. This too is what 
man’s histories would be, could other men write history in 
the same vivid, speaking characters, in which Shakspeare has 
placed so many of our kings in imperishable individuality 
before us. Only look at his King John : look at any histo¬ 
rian’s. Which gives you the liveliest, faithfullest representa¬ 
tion of that prince, and of his age % the poet ? or the 
historians'? Which most powerfully exposes his vices, and 
awakens the greatest horrour at them % Yet in Shakspeare 
he is still a man, and, as such, comes within the range of our 
sympathy : we can pity, even while we shudder at him : and 
our horrour moves us to look inward, into the awful depths 
of the nature which we share with him, instead of curdling 
into dead hatred and disgust. In the historians he is a 
sheer monster, the object of cold, contemptuous loathing, a 
poisonous reptile, whom we could crush to death with as 
little remorse as a viper. Or do you wish to gain an insight 
into the state and spirit of society in the latter half of the 
last century, during that period of bloated torpour out of 
which Europe was startled by the feverfit of the Revolution % 
I hardly know in what historian you will find more than a 











268 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


register of dates and a bulletin of facts. There are a number 
of Memoirs indeed, which shew us what a swarm of malig¬ 
nant passions were gathered round the heart of society, and 
how out of that heart did in truth proceed evil thoughts, 
adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, malice, 
deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. 
Nay, as our Lord’s words have often been misinterpreted, 
many of those Memoirs might tempt us to fancy, that these 
are the only fruits which the heart of man can bring forth. 
Would you understand the true character of that age how¬ 
ever, its better side as well as its worse, its craving for good 
as well as its voracity for evil ? would you watch the powers 
in their living fermentation, instead of dabbling in their 
dregs ! In Goethe’s novels, and in some of his dramas, will 
you most clearly perceive how homeless and anchorless and 
restless mankind had become, from the decay of every 
ancestral feeling, and the undermining of every positive 
institution ; how they drifted about before the winds, and 
prided themselves on their drifting, and mockt at the rocks 
for standing so fast. In them you will see how the heart, 
when it had cast out faith, was mere emptiness, a yawning 
gulf, sucking in all things, yet never the fuller; how Love, 
when the sanctity of Marriage had faded away, was fain to 
seek a sanctity in itself, and threw itself into the arms of 
Nature, and could not tear itself from her grasp save by 
death ; how men, when the bonds of society and law had 
lost their force, were still led by their social instinct to enter 
into secret unions, and nominally for good purposes, but 
such as flattered and fostered personal vanity, disburdening 
them from that yoke, which we are always eager to cast off, 
in the delusive imagination of asserting our freedom, but 
which alone can make us truly free, as it alone can make us 
truly happy, when we bear it readily and willingly,—the 
yoke of Duty. Here, as in so many other cases, while the 
historians give you the body, and often no more than the 
carcass, of history, it is in the poet that you must seek for 
its spirit. 

But surely it is part of a historian’s office to explain by 







GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


269 


what principles and passions the persons in his history were 
actuated. 

Undoubtedly : so far as he can. Sundry difficulties how¬ 
ever impede him in doing this, which do not stand in the 
way of the poet. A historian has to confine himself to 
certain individuals, not such as he himself would have 
selected to exemplify the character of the age, but those who 
from their station happened to act the most prominent parts 
in it. Now these in monarchal states will often be insignifi¬ 
cant. Hence modern historians are under a great disad¬ 
vantage, when compared with those of Greece and Rome; 
where the foremost men could hardly be without some 
personal claims to distinction. Even Cleon and Clodius 
were not so : they belong to the picture of their age, as 
Thersites does to that of the Iliad ; and they are important 
as samples of the spirit that was hastening the ruin of their 
country. Nor can a historian place his persons in such 
situations, and make them so speak and act, as to set off 
their characters. He must keep to those circumstances and 
actions which have chanced to gain the most notoriety, and 
for which he can produce the best evidence. This is one of 
the reasons which led Aristotle to declare that Poetry is a 
more excellent and philosophical thing than History; because, 
as he says, the business of Poetry is with general truth, that 
of History with particulars. Or, if you will take up that 
volume, you will find the same thing well exprest by Dave- 
nant in the Preface to Gondibert. There is the passage : 
“ Truth narrative and past is the idol of historians, who 
worship a dead thing : and Truth operative, and by effects 
continually alive, is the mistress of poets, who hath not her 
existence in matter, but in reason.” That is, the poet may 
choose such characters, and may bring them forward in such 
situations, as shall be typical of the truths which he wishes 
to embody : whereas the historian is tied down to particular 
actions, most of them performed officially, and rarely such as 
display much of character, unless in moments of exaggerated 
vehemence. Indeed many histories give you little else than 
a narrative of military affairs, marches and countermarches, 













270 


GUESSES AT TEUTH. 


skirmishes and battles : which, except during some great 
crisis of a truly national war, afford about as complete a 
picture of a nation’s life, as an account of the doses of 
physic a man may have taken, and the surgical operations he 
may have undergone, would of the life of an individual. 
Moreover a historian has to proceed analytically, in detecting 
the motives and impulses of the persons whose actions he 
has to relate. He is to make out what they were, from what 
they are recorded to have done. Afterward, it is true, he 
ought to invert the process, and to give a synthetical unity 
to the features he has made out in detail. But very few 
historians have had this twofold power. This may be one of 
the reasons why, among the hundreds of characters in Walter 
Scott’s novels, hardly one has not more life and reality than 
his portrait of Buonaparte. The former spring freshly from 
his genius : the latter is put together, like a huge mammoth, 
of fragments pickt up here and there, many of which ill fit 
into the others, and is scarcely more than a skeleton with a 
gaudy chintz dressing-gown thrown round him. As histo¬ 
rians have themselves had to go behind the scenes to examine 
what was doing there, they are fond of taking and keeping 
us behind them also, and bid us mark how the actors are 
rouged, and what tawdry tinsel they wear, and by what 
pullies the machinery is workt. Poets on the other hand 
would have you watch and listen to the performance. 
Suppose it were a drama by any human poet, from which 
position would you best understand its meaning and 
purpose ? 

From the latter : there cannot be a doubt. 

The' same position will best enable you to discern the 
meaning and purpose of the Almighty Poet; in other 
words, to know truth. Were you to live inside of a watch, 
you could neither use it, nor know its use. Were our sight 
fixt on the inner workings of our bodies, as that of persons 
in a magnetic trance is said to be, we should have no con¬ 
ception what a man is, or does, or was made for. Sorry too 
would be the notion of the earth pickt up at the bottom of 
a mine. In like manner, to understand men’s characters, 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 271 

one must contemplate them as living wholes, in their energy 
of action or of suffering, not creep maggotlike into them, 
and crawl about from one rotten motive to another, turning 
that rotten with our touch, which is not so already. 

Yet in this respect you surely cannot deny that History 
is much truer than Poetry. For, when reading poetry, you 
may at times be beguiled into fancying that there are people 
who will act nobly and generously and disinterestedly : 
whereas from history we learn to look askance upon every 
man with prudent suspicion and jealousy. Almost all the 
historians I ever read concur in shewing that the world is 
wholly swayed by the love of money and of power; and 
that nobody ever did a good deed, unless it slipt from him 
by mistake, except because he could not just then do a bad 
deed, or wanted to gain a purchase for doing a bad deed with 
less risk and more profit at some future time. 

Did you never act rightly yourself, purposing so to act, 
without any evil design, or any thought of what you were to 
gain 1 

Do you mean to insult me 1 I hope I do so always. 

Are all your friends a pack of heartless, worthless knaves. 

Good morning, sir ! I have no friend who is not an 
honest man; and civility and courtesy are among their 
estimable qualities. 

Wait a few moments. I congratulate you on your good 
fortune, and only wish you not to suppose that you stand 
alone in it. I would have you judge of others, as you 
would have them judge of you. I would have you believe 
that there are other honest men in the world, beside yourself 
and your friends. 

But how can I believe it, when every historian teaches me 
the contraiw ? 

How can you believe that you and your friends are so 
totally different from the rest of mankind % 

I don’t know. This used to puzzle me ; but, as I could 
not clear it up, I left off troubling my head about it. 

Let me give you a piece of advice. When your feelings 
tell you anything, and your understanding contradicts them, 



GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


272 

more especially should your understanding be merely echoing 
the verdict of another man's—be not hasty in sacrificing 
what you feel, to what you fancy you understand. You 
cannot do it in real life, as you proved just now : a running 
stream is not to be gagged with paper. But beware also of 
doing it in speculation : for, though erroneous opinions do 
not exercise an absolute sway over the heart and conduct, 
any more than the knowledge of truth does, still each has 
no slight influence, and errour the most; inasmuch as it 
stifles all efforts and aspirations after anything better, which 
truth would kindle and foster. Endeavour to reconcile the 
disputants where you can. As the speediest and surest 
means of effecting this, try to get to the bottom of the 
difference, to make out its origin and extent. Try not only 
to understand your feelings, but your understanding : for 
the latter is every whit as likely to stray, and to lead you 
astray. You have just been touching on the very point in 
common history which is the falsest. On this ground above 
all would I assert that, on whichever side the preponderance 
of truth may lie, with regard to untruth and falsehood there 
is no sort of comparison. 

To be sure, none. History is all true ; and poetry is 
all false. 

Alack ! this is just the usual course of an argument. 
After an hour’s discussion, carried on under the notion that 
some progress has been made, and some convictions establisht, 
we find we have only been running round a ring, and must 
start anew : the original position is reasserted as stoutly as 
ever. Well! you remember the old way of settling a 
dispute, by throwing a sword into the scale : let me throw 
in Frederic the Great’s pen, which is almost as trenchant, 
and to which his sword lends some of its power. Look at 
the words with which he opens his History : “La plupart 
des histoires que nous avons sont des compilations de men- 
songes mel6s de quelques verites.” I do not mean to stand 
up for the strict justice of this censure. But he is a 
historian of your own school, an asserter and exposer of the 
profligacy of mankind. Thus much too is most certain, that 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


273 


circumstantial accuracy with regard to facts is a very ticklish 
matter ; as will be acknowledged by every one who has tried 
to investigate an occurrence even of yesterday, and in his 
own neighbourhood, when interests and passions have been 
pulling opposite ways. In this sense too may we say, as 
Raleigh says in a different sense, that, “ if we follow Truth 
too near the heels, it may haply strike out our eyes.” 
Therefore, on comparing the truthfulness of History and 
Poetry, it appears that History will inevitably have to record 
many facts as true, which are not true ; while the facts in 
Poetry, being avowedly fictitious, are not false. On the 
other hand, in the representation of character, Poetry 
portrays men in their composite individuality, mixt up of 
evil and good, as they are in real life : whereas historians 
too often anatomize men ; and then, being] unable to descry 
the workings of life, which has past away, busy themselves 
in tracing the more perceptible operations of disease. Hence 
it comes that they give us such false representations of 
human character : one of their chief defects is, that they 
have seldom enough of the poet in them. 

You would have them conjure away all the persons who 
have really existed, and call up a fantasmagoria of imaginary 
ideals in their stead. 

I would have them animate the dry bones of history, that 
they may rise up as living beings. Goethe calls the Memoirs 
of his life Dichtung und Wahrheit , Imagination and Truth; 
not meaning thereby that any of the events narrated are 
fictitious, but that they are related imaginatively, as seen by 
a poet’s eye, and felt by a poet’s heart. Indeed so far are 
they from being fictions, that through this very process they 
come forward in their highest, completest reality : so that 
Jacobi, in a letter to Dohm, when speaking of this very 
book, says : “ I was a party to many of the events related, 
and can bear witness that the accounts of them are truer 
than the truth itself.” 

How is that possible ? how can anything be truer than the 
truth itself ? 

Did you never hear of Coleridge’s remark on Chantrey’s 


i 







274 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

admirable bust of Wordsworth,—“ that it is more like 
Wordsworth than Wordsworth himself is.” This, we found 
•just now, a portrait or bust ought always to be. It oug t 
to represent a man in his permanent character, in his true sell; 
not, as we mostly see people, with that self encumbered and 
obscured by trivial, momentary feelings, and other frippery 
and rubbish. Now, as it requires a poet’s imagination to 
draw forth a man’s character from its lurking-place, and to 
bring out the central principle in which all his faculties and 
feelings unite ; so is the same power needed to seize and 
arrange the crowd of incidents that go to the making up of 
an event, and to exhibit them vividly and distinctly, yet m 
such wise that each shall only take its due station, according 
to its dramatic importance, as member of a greater whole. 
Even for the representation of events, as well as of cha¬ 
racters, a historian ought to be much of a poet: else his 
narrative will be flat, fragmentary, and confused. Look at 
a landscape on a chill, cloudy day : it seems dotted or patcht 
with objects : the parts do not blend, but stand sulkily or 
frowningly alone. Look at the same landscape under a 
clear, bright sunshine : the hills, rocks, woods, cornfields, 
meadows, will be just the same : and yet how different will 
they be ! When bathed in light, their latent beauties come 
out : each separate object too becomes more distinct ; and 
at the same time a harmonizing smile spreads over them all. 
This exactly illustrates the workings of the Imagination, 
which are in like manner at once individualizing and atoning ; 
and which, like the sunshine, brings out the real, essential 
truth of its objects more palpably than it would be per¬ 
ceptible by the sunless, unimaginative eye. The sunshine 
does indeed give much to the landscape ; yet what it gives 
belongs to the objects themselves; just as joy and love 
awaken the dormant energies of a man’s heart, and make 
him feel he has much within him that he never dreamt of 
before. Sunshine, poetry, love, joy, enrich us infinitely : 
but what makes their riches so precious is, that what they 
give us is our own : it is our own spirit that they free from 
its bondage, that they rouse out of its torpour. They give 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 275 

us ourselves. Hence, because the true nature both of events 
and characters cannot even be discerned, much less por¬ 
trayed, without a poet’s eye, is it of such importance that a 
historian should be not scantily endowed with imaginative 
power ; not indeed with an imagination like Walter Scott’s, 
which would lead him to represent the whole pantomime of 
life ; but with an imagination more akin to Shakspeare’s, so 
that he may perceive and embody the powers which have 
striven and struggled in the drama of life. If historians had 
oftener been gifted with this truthseeing faculty, we should 
find many more characters in history to admire and love, 
and fewer to hate and despise. Often too, when forced to 
condemn, we should still see much to move our pity. 

After all, what you say amounts to this, that a historian 
wants imagination to varnish over men’s vices. 

He wants imagination to conceive a man’s character, 
without which it is impossible to comprehend his conduct. 
We are all prone, you know, to accuse or excuse one another, 
—a proneness which is so far valuable, as it is a witness of 
our moral nature : but unhappily we shew it much oftener 
by accusing than by excusing. From our tendency to 
generalize all our conclusions,—a tendency which also is 
valuable, as a witness that we are made for the discernment 
of law,—we are wont to try every one that ever lived by our 
own standard of right and wrong. Now that standard is an 
exceedingly proper one to try the only persons we never try 
by it . . ourselves. But to others it cannot justly be 
applied, without being modified more or less by a reference 
to their outward circumstances and condition, to their 
education and habits,—nay, to the inward bent and force of 
their feelings and passions. No reasonable man will demand 
the same virtues from a Heathen as from a Christian, or 
quarrel with Marcus Aurelius because he was not St Louis. 
Nor will he-look for the same qualities in Alcibiades as in 
^Socrates, or for the same in Alexander as in Aristotle. Nor 
again would it be fair to condemn Themistocles, because he 
did not act like Aristides,—or Luther, because he differed 
from Melanchthon. Only when we have caught sight of the 



27C guesses at truth. 

central principle of a man’s character,—when we have ascer. 
tained the purpose he set himself-when we have carefully 
weighed the difficulties he had to contend against, within 
his own heart as well as without—can we be qualified for 
passing judgement on his conduct: and they who are thus 
qualified will mostly refrain from pronouncing a peremptory 
sentence. To attain to such an insight however requires 
imagination; it requires candour ; it requires charity : it 
requires a mind in which the main ingredients of wisdom 
are duly combined and balanced. On this point you will 
find some excellent remarks in Coleridge’s Notes on Hacket s 
Life of Bishop Williams (Remains iii. 185). “ In the history 

of the morality of a people, prudence, yea cunning, is the 
earliest form of virtue. This is exprest in Jacob and m 
Ulysses, and all the most ancient fables. It will require the 
true philosophic calm and serenity to distinguish and ap¬ 
preciate the character of the morality of our great men 
from Henry VIII. to the close of James l.,—nullum numen 
abest, si sit prudentia ,—and of those of Charles I. to the 
Restoration. The difference almost amounts to contrast. 
And again (p. 194): “ I can scarcely conceive a greater 
difficulty, than for an honest, warmhearted man of principle 
of the present day so to discipline his mind by reflexion on 
the circumstances and received moral system of the Stuarts 
age (from Elizabeth to the death of Charles I.), and its 
proper place in the spiral line of ascension, as to be able to 
regal’d the Duke of Buckingham as not a villain, and to 
resolve many of the acts of those Princes into passions, 
conscience-warpt and hardened by half-truths, and the secular 
creed of prudence, as being itself virtue, instead of one of 
her handmaids, when interpreted by minds constitutionally 
and by their accidental circumstances imprudent and rash, 
yet fearful and suspicious, and with casuists and codes of 
casuistry as their conscience-leaders.” 

On the other hand historians are apt to write mainly from 
the Understanding, and therefore presumptuously and 
narrowmindedly. Dwelling amid abstractions, the U nder- 
standing has no eye for the rich varieties of real life, but 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


277 


only sees its own forms and fictions. Hence no faculty is so 
monotonous ; a Jew’s harp itself is scarcely more so; while 
the Imagination embraces and comprehends the full, perfect, 
magnificent diapason of Nature. The Understanding draws 
a circle around itself, and fences itself in with rules; and 
every other circle it pronounces to be awry; whatever lies 
without those rules, it declares to be wrongs Above all is it 
perverse and delusive in its chase after motives. Beholding 
all things under the category of cause and effect, it lays 
down, as its prime axiom, that every action must have a 
motive. Then, as its dealings are almost wholly with out¬ 
ward things, it determines that the motive of every action 
must lie in something external. Now, since all actions, 
inasmuch as they manifest themselves in time and space, 
must needs come under the category of causation, there is 
little difficulty in tracing them to such a motive, and none 
in insisting that it must be the only one. But the outward 
motive of an action, when it stands alone, must always be 
imperfect : it can only receive a higher sanction from an 
inward, spiritual principle : very often too it will be corrupt. 
So that this source will mostly be impure : or, if it be too 
pure and clear, nothing is easier than to trouble it : you 
have only to tear up a flower from the brink, and to throw 
it in. Every good deed does good even to the doer : this 
is God’s law. It does him good, not merely by confirming 
and strengthening the better principle within him, by 
purifying and refreshing his spirit, and unsealing the 
fountains of joy and peace : it is also fraught more or less, 
according to the laws of the universe, with outward blessings, 
.—with health, security, honour, esteem, confidence, and at 
times even with some of the lower elements of worldly pros¬ 
perity. Every doer of good is worthy of admiration and 
praise and trust : this is man’s instinctive way of realizing 
and fulfilling God’s law. No good deed is done, except for 
the sake of the good the doer is to get from it : this is 
man’s intelligent way of blaspheming, and, so far as in him 
lies, annulling God’s law. This is the lesson which the 
school of selfish philosophers have learnt from their father 








278 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

and prototype, who prided himself on his craft, when he askt 
that searching question, Does Job fear God for nought ? 

You, my young friend, know that it is otherwise with you. 
Your conscience, enlightened by your reason, commands you 
to uphold that no action can be good, except such as you 
perform without a thought of any benefit accruing to 
yourself from it. You conceive, and rightly, I doubt not, 
that you sometimes act thus yourself. You are confident 
that your friends do. Hold fast that confidence : cleave to 
it : preserve and cherish it, as you would your honour, that 
sacred palladium of your soul. Do more : extend it to all: 
enlarge it, until, as the rainbow embraces the earth, it 
embraces all those whom God has made in His image. Cast 
away that dastardly, prudential maxim, that you are to 
trust no one until you have tried him. Let this be your 
comfortable and hopeful watchword, never to distrust any 
one, until you have tried him, and found him fail. Nay, 
after he has failed, trust him again, even until seven times, 
even until seventy times seven : so peradventure may your 
good thoughts of him win him to entertain better thoughts 
of himself. And be assured that in this respect, above all 
others, Poetry knows far more of God’s world ; with what¬ 
ever justice History may brag of knowing the most about 
the Devil’s world.* u. 

* I cannot deny myself the pleasure of confirming what is here said by 
the authority of one of those great soldiers and statesmen whom our Indian 
Empire breeds, and who has exemplified the power of these principles by 
his own wonderful achievements, both pacific and military, on the banks 
of the Indus. Major Edwardes, in his very interesting Journal of a Year 
in the Punjab (vol. i. p. 57), after speaking of an expedition he undertook 
into the country of the savage Yizeeree tribes, relying on the honour of 
one of their chiefs, adds : “I pause upon this apparently trifling incident, 
for no foolish vanity of my own, but for the benefit of others : for hoping, 
as I earnestly do, that many a young soldier, glancing over these pages, 
will gather heart and encouragement for the stormy lot before him, I 
desire above all things to put into his hand the staff of confidence in his 
fellow-men. 

1 Candid, and generous, and just, 

Boys care but little whom they trust,— 

An errour soon corrected : 

For who but learns in riper years 
That man, when smoothest he appears, 

Is most to be suspected—’ 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


279 


is a verse very pointed and clever, but quite unworthy of the Ode to 
Friendship , and inculcating a creed which would make a sharper or a 
monk of whoever should adopt it. The man who cannot trust others, is, 
by his own shewing, untrustworthy himself. Suspicious of all, depending 
on himself for everything, from the conception to the deed, the groundplan 
to the chimney-pot, he will fail for want of the heads of Hydra, and the 
hands of Briareus. If there is any lesson that I have learnt from Me, it 
is that human nature, black or white, is better than we think it : and he 
who reads these pages to a close, will see how much faith I have had 
occasion to place in the rudest and wildest of their species, how nobly it 
was deserved, and how useless I should have been without it. ’ 




































































SECOND SERIES. 


Hardly do we guess aright at tilings that are upon earth ; and with 
labour do we find the things that are before us : but the things that are 
in heaven who hath searched out ?—Wisdom of Solomon , ix. 16. 

Yasta ut plurimum solent esse quae inania : solida contrahuntur maxime, 
et in parvo sita sunt.— Bacon, Inst. Magn. Praef. 




ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION. 

This volume is called a second Edition; for a portion of it was 
contained in the former : but more than three fourths are new. The 
first eight sheets were printed off ten years ago : hence, in the dis¬ 
cussion on the Progress of mankind, no notice is taken of the views 
concerning Development in reference to religious truth, which have 
recently been exciting so much agitation and confusion. Indeed 
almost all the new matter inserted in this Volume was written above 
ten years since, though, in transcribing it for the press, I have often 
modified and enlarged it to bring it into conformity with my present 
convictions. A succession of other works has hitherto interrupted 
the prosecution of this ; and several are now calling me away from it* 
But, as soon as I can get my hands free, I hope, God willing, to 
publish a second Edition of the original Second Volume. This second 
Series only goes down to the end of the original First Volume. 

J. C. H. 


Rockend, 

May 10 th, 1848. 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


In the wars of the middle ages, when the armies were 
lying in their camps, single knights would often sally forth 
to disport themselves in breaking a lance. In modem war¬ 
fare too the stillness of a night before a battle is ever and 
anon interrupted by a solitary cannon-shot; which does not 
always fall without effect. Ahab was slain by an arrow let 
off at a venture : nor are his the only spolia opima that 
Chance has borne away to adorn her triumphs. 

Detacht thoughts in literature, under whatsoever name 
they may be cast forth into the world,—Maxims, Aphorisms, 
Essays, Resolves, Hints, Meditations, Aids to Reflexion, 
Guesses,—may be regarded as similar sallies and disportings 
of those who are loth to lie rusting in inaction, though they 
do not feel themselves called to act more regularly and in 
mass. And these too are not wholly without worth and 
power ; which is not uniformly in proportion to bulk. One 
of the lessons of the late wars has been, that large disciplined 
bodies are not the only effective force ; Cossacks and Guerillas, 
we have seen, may render good service in place and season. 
A curious and entertaining treatise might be written de vi 
quae residet in minimis. Even important historical events 
have been kindled by the spark of an epigram or a jest. 

In some cases, as in Novalis, we see youthful genius 
gushing in radiant freshness, and sparkling and bringing out 
some bright hue on every object around, until it has found 












284 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

or made itself a more continuous channel. And as Spring 
sheds its blossoms, so does Autumn its golden fruit. Mature 
and sedate wisdom has been fond of summing up the results 
of its experience in weighty sentences. Solomon did so : the 
wise men of India and of Greece did so : Bacon did so : 
Goethe in his old age took delight in doing so. The sea 
throws up shells and pebbles that it has smoothed by rolling 
them in its bosom : and what though children alone should 
play with them ? “ Cheered by their merry shouts, old 

Ocean smiles.” 

A dinner of fragments is said often to be the best dinner. 
So are there few minds but might furnish some instruction 
and entertainment out of their scraps, their odds and ends 
of thought. They who cannot weave a uniform web, may at 
least produce a piece of patchwork; which may be useful, 
and not without a charm of its own. The very sharpness 
and abruptness with which truths must be asserted, when 
they are to stand singly, is not ill fitted to startle and rouse 
sluggish and drowsy minds. Nor is the present shattered 
and disjointed state of the intellectual world unaptly repre¬ 
sented by a collection of fragments. When the waters are 
calm, they reflect an image in its unity and completeness ; 
but when they are tossing restlessly, it splits into bits. So 
too, when the central fires are raging, they shake the main¬ 
land, and strew it with ruins, but now and then cast up 
islands. And if we look through history, the age of Asia 
seems to have passed away; and we are approaching to that 
of Polynesia. 

Only whatsoever may be brought together in these pages, 
though but a small part be laid within the courts of the 
temple itself, may we never stray so far as to lose it out of 
sight; and along with the wood and hay and stubble, may 
there be here and there a grain of silver, if not of gold. u. 

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature. 

On the outside of things seek for differences; on the inside 
for likenesses. 







GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


285 


Notions may be imported by books from abroad • ideas 
must be grown at home by thought. 


If the Imagination be banisht from the garden of Eden, 
she will take up her abode in the island of Armida; and that 
soon changes into Circe’s. u. 


Why have oracles ceast? Among other reasons, because 
we have the books of the wise in their stead. But these too 
will not answer aright, unless the right question be put to 
them. Nay, when the answer has been uttered, he who hears 
it must know how to interpret and to apply it. u. 


One may develope an idea : it is -what God has taught us 
to do in His successive revelations. But one cannot add 
to it, least of all in another age. 


Congruity is not beauty : but it is essential to beauty. 
In every well-bred mind the perception of incongruity 
impedes and interrupts the perception of beauty. Hence 
the recent opening of the view upon St. Martin’s church has 
marred the beauty of the portico : the heavy steeple presses 
down on it and crushes it. The combination is as monstrous, 
as it would be to tack on the last act of Addison’s Cato to 
the Philoctetes of Sophocles. 

In truth steeples, which belong to the upward-looking 
principle of Christian architecture, never harmonize well 
with the horizontal, earthly character of the Greek temple. 
To understand the beauty of the latter, one must see it free 
from this extraneous and incompatible incumbrance. One 
should see it too with a southern sky to crown it and look 
through it. u. 

Homer calls words winged; and the epithet is peculiarly 
appropriate to his; which do indeed seem to fly,—so rapid 
and light is their motion ; and which have been flying ever 
since over the whole of the peopled earth, and still hover and 
brood over many an awakening soul. Latin marches; Italian 














286 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


floats ; French hops ; English walks; German rumbles along : 
the music of Klopstock’s hexameter is not unlike the tune 
with which a broad-wheel waggon tries to solace itself, 
when crawling down a hill. But Greek flies, especially in 
Homer. 

His meaning, or rather the meaning of his age, in assigning 
that attribute to words, was probably to express their power 
of giving wings to thoughts, whereby they fly from one 
breast to another. For a like reason may letters be called 
'winged, as speeding the flight of thoughts far beyond the 
reach of sounds, and prolonging it for ages after the sounds 
liave died away; so that the thoughts entrusted to them are 
wafted to those who are far off both in space and in time. 
Above all does the epithet belong to printing : for, by means 
of its leaden types, that which has been bred in the secret 
caverns of the mind, no sooner comes forth, than thousands 
of wings are given to it at once, and it roams abroad in a 
thousand bodies; each several body moreover being the 
exact counterpart of all the others, to a degree scarcely 
attained by any other process of nature or of art. 

Ta)V q)(tt opviOav Trererjvaiv e6uea 7 roXXci, 
vrjvaiv rj yepavcov rj kvkvco v dov'kL^obetpoov, 
ev6a Kal evOa norcovTcu dyciWopwcu nTepvyear(nv, 

K\ayyrjbov TrpoKadt^ovTcov, c rpapayei de re Xa/zooi/. 

U. 


The Schoolmen have been accused of syllogizing without 
facts. Their accusers, those I mean who sophisticate and 
explain away the dictates of their consciousness, do worse. 
They syllogize against facts, facts not doubtful and obscure, 
but manifest and certain; seeing that “ to feel a thing in 
oneself is the surest way of knowing it.” South, Yol. ii. 
p. 236. 


They who profess to give the essence of things, in most 
cases merely give the extract; or rather an extract, or, it 
may be, several, pickt out at chance or will. They repeat 
the blunder of the Greek dunce, who brought a brick as a 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 287 

sample of a house : and how many such dunces do we still 
find, calling on us to judge of books by like samples ! At 
•best they just tap the cask, and offer you a cup of its con¬ 
tents, having previously half filled the cup with water, or 
some other less innocent diluent. u. 

When a man cannot walk without crutches, he would fain 
make believe they are stilts. Like most impostors too, he 
gives ear to his own lie; till, lifting up one of them in a 
fit of passion, to knock down a person who doubts him, he 
falls to the ground. And there he has to remain sprawling : 
the crutch, by help of which he contrived to stand, will not 
enable him to rise. u. 

What do you mean by the lords spiritual ? askt Madame 
de Stael: are they so called because they are so spirituels ? 
How exactly do esprit and spirituel express what the French 
deem the highest power and glory of the human mind ! A 
large part of their literature is mousseux: and whatever is so 
soon grows flat. 

Our national word and quality is sense; which may 
perhaps betray a tendency to materialism ; but which at all 
events comprehends a greater body of thought, thought that 
has settled down and become substantiated in maxims. u. 


Hardly any period of afterlife is so rich in vivid and rap¬ 
turous enjoyment, as that when Knowledge is first unfolding 
its magical prospects to a genial and ardent youth ; when 
his eyes open to discern the golden network of thought 
wherein man has robed the naked limbs of the world, and to 
see all that he feels teeming and glowing within his breast, 
embodied in glorified and deathless forms in the living gal¬ 
lery of Poetry. So long as we continue under magisterial 
discipline and guidance, we are apt to regard our studies as 
a mechanical and often irksome taskwork. Our growing 
presumption is loth to acknowledge that we are unable to 
walk alone, that our minds need leading-strings so much 
longer than our bodies. But when the impatient scholar 






288 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


finds himself set free, with the blooming paradise of ima^ 
gination and thought spread out before him, his mind, like 
the butterfly, by which the Greeks so aptly and character¬ 
istically typified their spirit, exulting in the beauty which it 
everywhere perceives, both without itself and within, and 
delighting to prove and exercise its newly developt faculty of 
admiring and loving, will hover from flower to flower, from 
charm to charm ; and now, seeming chiefly to rejoice in its 
motion, and in the glancing of its bright and many-coloured 
wings, merely snatches a passing kiss from each, now sinks 
down on some chosen favorite, and loses all consciousness of 
sense or life in the ecstacy of its devotion. 

In more advanced years, the student rather resembles the 
honey-seeking, honey-gathering, honey-storing bee. He esti¬ 
mates : he balances : he compares. He picks out what seems 
best to him from the banquet lying before him : and even 
this he has to season to his own palate. But at first every¬ 
thing attracts, everything pleases him. The simple sense, 
whether of action or of feeling, whatever may be their 
object, is sufficient. The mind roams from fancy to fancy, 
from truth to truth, from one world of thought to another 
world of thought, with an ease, rapidity, and elastic power, 
like that with which it has been imagined that the soul, 
when freed from the body, will wander from star to star. 
Hay, even after the wild landscape, through which youth 
strayed at will, has been laid out into fields and gardens, 
and enclosed with fences and hedges, after the footsteps, 
which had bounded over the flower-strewn grass, have been 
circumscribed within trim gravel walks, the vision of its 
former happiness will still at times float before the mind in 
its dreams. Unless it has been bent down and hardened by 
the opposition it has had to struggle with, it will still retain 
a dim, vivifying hope, although it may not venture to shape 
that hope into words, that it may again one day behold a 
similar harmonious universe bursting forth from the jarring 
and fragmentary chaos of hollow realities,—that in its own 
place and station it may, as Frederic Schlegel expresses it, 







GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


289 


Build for all arts one temple of communion, 

Itself a new example of their union ;— 

and that it may at least witness the prelude to that final 
consummation, when, as in the beginning, all things will 
again be one. u. 


Set a company of beginners in archery shooting at a mark. 
Their arrows will all fly wide of it, some on one side, some 
on the opposite : and while they are all thus far off, many a 
dispute will arise as to which of them has come the nearest. 
But in proportion as they improve in skill, their arrows will 
fall nearer to the mark, and to each other : and when they 
are fixt in the target, there is much less controversy about 
them. Now suppose them to attain to such a pitch of 
mastery, that every arrow shall go straight to the bull’s eye : 
they will all coincide. This may help us to understand how 
the differences of the wise and good, which are often so per¬ 
plexing and distracting now, will be reconciled hereafter; 
when the film of mortality is drawn away from their eyes, 
and their faculties are strengthened to see truth, and to 
strive after it, and to reach it. a. 

Only, if we would hit the truth, we must indeed aim at 
it. Else the more we improve in handling the bow, the 
further away from it shall we send our arrows. As for that 
numerous class, who, instead of aiming at truth, have merely 
aimed at glorifying themselves, their arrows will be found to 
have recoiled, like that of Adrastus in Statius, and to be 
sticking their deadly, barbed points into their own souls. 
Alas ! there are many such pseudo-Sebastians walking about, 
bristled with suicidal darts, living martyrs to their own 
vain-glory. u. 

Heroism is active genius ; genius, contemplative heroism. 
Heroism is the self-devotion of genius manifesting itself in 
action j 17 Oeias tivos <fiv(T€(os evipyeia, as a Greek would more 
closely have defined it. 











290 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


These are the men to employ, in peace as well as in war, 
the men who are afraid of no fire except hell-fire. 

How few, how easily to be counted up, are the cardinal 
names in the history of the human mind ! Thousands and 
tens of thousands spend their days in the preparations which 
are to speed the predestined change, in gathering and 
amassing the materials which are to kindle and give light 
and warmth, when the fire from heaven has descended on 
them. But when that flame has once blazed up, its very 
intensity often shortens its duration. Many, yea, without 
number, are the sutlers and pioneers, the engineers and 
artisans, who attend the march of intellect. Many are 
busied in building and fitting up and painting and emblazon¬ 
ing the chariot; others in lessening the friction of the 
wheels : others move forward in detachments, and level the 
way it is to pass over, and cut down the obstacles which 
would impede its progress. And these too have their reward. 
If so be they labour diligently in their calling, not only will 
they enjoy that calm contentment which diligence in the 
lowliest task never fails to win; not only will the sweat of 
their brows be sweet, and the sweetener of the rest that 
follows ; but, when the victory is at last achieved, they come 
in for a share of the glory; even as the meanest soldier who 
fought at Marathon or at Leipsic, became a sharer in the 
glory of those saving days; and within his own household 
circle, the approbation of which approaches the nearest to 
that of an approving conscience, was lookt upon as the 
representative of all his brother heroes, and could tell such 
tales as made the tear glisten on the cheek of his wife, 
and lit up his boy’s eyes with an unwonted, sparkling 
eagerness. 

At length however, when the appointed hour is arrived, 
and everything is ready, the master-mind leaps into the seat 
that is awaiting him, and fixes his eye on heaven ; and the 
selfmoving wheels roll onward; and the road prepared for 
them is soon past over ; and the pioneers and sutlers are left 
behind ; and the chariot advances further and further, until 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


291 


I 


it has reacht its goal, and stands as an inviting beacon on 
the top of some distant mountain. 

Hereupon the same labours recur. Thousands after thou¬ 
sands must toil to attain on foot to the spot, to which genius 
had been borne in an instant; and much time is spent in 
clearing and paving the road, so that the multitude may be 
able to go along it,—in securing for all by reflexion and 
analysis, what the prophetic glance of intuition had descried 
at once. And then again the like preparations are to be 
made for the advent of a second seer, of another epoch- j 
making master-mind. Thus, when standing on the beach, 
you may see the rpiKVfxla, as the Greeks called it, outrunning, 
not only the waves that went before, but those that come j 
after it : and you may sometimes have to wait long, ere any 
reaches the mark, which some mighty, over-arching, onrushing j 
billow, some fluctus decumanus has left. 

That there have been such third and tenth waves among 
men, will be apparent to those who call to mind how far the 
main herd of metaphysicians are still lagging behind Plato ; 
and how, for near two thousand years, they were almost all 
content to feed on the crumbs dropt from Aristotle’s table. 

It is proved by the fact, that even in physical science, the 
progress of which, it is now thought, nothing can check or j 
retard,—and in which, more than in any other province of j 
human activity, whatever knowledge is once gained forms a 
lasting fund for afterages to inherit and trade with,—not a 
single step was taken, not a single discovery made, as Whewell 
observes, either in mechanics or hydrostatics, between the 
time of Archimedes and of Galileo. Indeed the whole of 
Whewell’s History of Science so strikingly illustrates the 
foregoing remarks, that, had they not been written long 
before, they might be supposed to be drawn immediately 
from it. The very plan of his work, which his subject forces 
upon him, divides itself in like manner into preludes, or 
periods of preparation, inductive epochs, when the great dis¬ 
coveries are made, and sequels, during which those discoveries 
are more fully establisht and developt, and more generally 
diffused. 

u .2 









292 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Or, if we look to poetry,—to which the law of progression 
no way applies, any more than to beauty, but which, like 
beauty, is mostly in its prime during the youth of a nation, 
and then is wont to decline,—so entirely do great poets 
soar beyond the reach, and almost beyond the ken of their 
own age, that we have only lately begun to have a right 
understanding of Shakspeare, or of the masters of the Greek 
drama,—to discern the principles which actuated them, the 
purposes they had in view, the laws they acknowledged, and 
the ideas they wisht to impersonate. 

And is the case different in the arts ? What do we see in | 
architecture, but two ideas shining upon us out of the depth 
of bygone ages, that of the Greek temple, and that of the 
Gothic minster ? Each of these was a living idea, and, as 
such, capable of manifold development, expansion, and modi¬ 
fication. Nor were they unwilling to descend from their 
sacred throne, and to adapt themselves to the various wants 
of civil life. But what architectural idea has sprung up 
since ? These are both the offspring of dark ages : what 
have we given birth to, since we dreamt we had a sun within 
us ? One might almost suppose that, as Dryden says, in his 
stupid epigram on Milton, “ The force of Nature could no 
further go so that, “ To make a third, we joined the other 
two.” If of late years there has been any improvement, it 
consists solely in this, that we have separated the incongruous 
elements, and have tried to imitate each style in a manner 
more in accord with its original principle ; although both of 
them are ill suited for divers reasons to the needs of modern 
society. Yet nothing like a new idea has arisen, unless it be 
that of the factory, or the gashouse, or the gaol. 

In sculpture, it is acknowledged, the Greeks still stand 
alone : and among the Greeks themselves the art declined 
after the age of Phidias and Praxiteles. In painting too 
who has there been for the last century worthy to hold 
Raphael’s palette? Even in what might be deemed a 
mechanical excellence, colouring, we are put to shame, when 
we presume to shew our faces by the side of our greater 
ancestors. TT 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 293 

From what has just been said, we may perceive how 
baseless and delusive is the vulgar notion of the march of 
mind, as necessarily exhibiting a steady, regular advance, 
within the same nation, in all things. Even in the mechanical 
arts,—which depend so little on individual eminence, and 
which seem to require nothing more than the talents ordi¬ 
narily forthcoming, according as there is a demand for them, 
in every people,—although the progress in them is more 
continuous, and outlasts that in higher things, yet, when the 
intellectual and moral energy of a nation has declined, that 
decline becomes perceptible after a while in the very lowest 
branches of trade and manufacture. Civilization will indeed 
outlive that energy, and keep company for a long time with 
luxury. But if luxury extinguishes the energy of a people, 
so that it cannot revive, its civilization too will at length 
sink into barbarism. The decay of the Roman mind under 
the empire manifests itself not merely in its buildings, its 
statues, its language, but even in the coins, in the shape 
and workmanship of the commonest utensils. 

In fact it is only when applied on the widest scale to the 
whole human race, that there is the slightest truth in the 
doctrine of the perfectibility, or rather of the progressiveness 
of man. Nay, even when regarded in this light, if we take 
nothing further into account, than what man can do and will 
do for himself, the notion of his perfectibility is as purely 
visionary, as the search after an elixir of life, or any other 
means of evading the pains and frailties of our earthly 
nature. The elixir of life we have : the doctrine and means 
of perfectibility we have : and we know them to be true and 
sure. But they are not of our own making. They do not lie 
within the compass of our own being. They come to us from 
without, from above. The only view of human nature, as 
left to itself, which is not incompatible with all experience, is 
not its perfectibility, but its corruptibility. 

This is the view to which we are led by the history of the 
antediluvian world. This is the view represented in the 
primeval fable of the four ages; the view exprest in those 
lines of the Roman poet: 



I 

294 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

Aetas parentum, pejor avis, tulit 
Nos nequiores, mox daturos 
Progeniem yitiosiorem. 

Indeed it is the view which man has in all ages taken of his 
own nature; whether his judgement was determined by 
what he saw within himself, or in the world around him. It 
I is the view to which he is prompted when his thoughts fall 
back on the innocence of his own childhood, when he com¬ 
pares it with his present debasement, and thinks of the 
struggles he has had to maintain against himself, and against 
others, in order to save himself from a still more abject 
degradation. The same lesson is taught him by the destinies 
of nations ; which, when they have left their wild mountain- 
sources, will mostly meander playfully for a while amid hills 
of beauty, and then flow majestically through plains of luxu¬ 
riant richness, until at last they lose themselves in morasses, 
and choke themselves up with their own alluvion. 

Of a like kind is the main theme and subject of poetry. 
Its scroll, as well as that of history, is like the roll which is 
spread out before the prophet, written within and without; 
and the matter of the writing is the same, lamentations, and 
mourning, and woe. When we have swallowed it sub¬ 
missively indeed, it turns to sweetness; but not till then : 
in the words of the Greek philosopher, it is through terrour 
and pity that poetry purifies our feelings. Hence the name 
| of the highest branch of poetry is become a synonym for 
every disaster : tragedy is but another term for lamentations 
and mourning and woe : while epic poetry delights chiefly to 
dwell on the glories and fall of a nobler bygone generation. 
With such an unerring instinct does man’s spirit recoil from 
the thought of an earthly elysium, as attainable by his own 
powers, however great and admirable they may be. What 
though his strength may seem vast enough to snatch the 
cup of bliss ! what though his intellect appear subtile enough 
to compass or steal it ! what though he send his armies and 
fleets round the globe, and his thoughts among the stars, 
and beyond them ! he knows that the disease of his will is 
sure to undermine both his strength and his intellect; and 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


295 


that, the higher they mount for the moment, the more 
terrible will their ruin be, and the more certain. He knows 
that Sisyphus is no less sure than Typhoeus of being cast 
into hell through his own perversity ; and that only through 
the flames of the funeral pile can Hercules rise into glory. 
It was reserved for a feebleminded, earth-worshiping, self- 
idolizing age to find out that a tragedy should end happily. 

Nor will the boasted discovery of modern times, the 
division of labour,—which the senters-out of allegories will 
suppose to be the truth veiled in the myth of Kehama’s 
self-multiplication, when he is marching against Padalon to 
seize a throne among the gods,—avail to alter this. The 
Roman fable warns us what is sure to ensue, when the 
members split and set up singly : and the state of England 
at this day affords sad confirmation to the lesson, that, 
unless they work together under the sway of a constraining 
higher spirit, they jar and clash and cumber and thwart and 
[ maim each other. 

The notion entertained by some of the ancients, that, 
when a person has soared to an inordinate pitch of pros¬ 
perity, the envy of the gods is provoked to cast him down, 
is merely a perversion of the true idea. Man’s wont has 
ever been to throw off blame upon anything except himself; 
even upon the powers of heaven, when he can find no 
earthly scapegoat. At the same time this very notion bears 
witness of the pervading conviction that a state of earthly 
I perfection is an impossibility. The fundamental idea both of 
the tragic arq and of the historic vifieais is, that calamities 
are the inevitable consequences of sins ; that the chain 
which binds them together, though it may be hidden and 
mysterious, is indissoluble; and that, as man is sure to sin, 
more especially when puft up by prosperity, he is also sure to 
perish. The sins of the fathers are indeed regarded by both 
as often visited upon the children, even to the third and 
fourth generation; not however without their becoming in 
some measure accessory to the guilt. Were they not so, the 
calamities would be as harmless as the wounds of Milton’s 
angels. 














296 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


This however, which is the essential point in the whole 
argument,—the concatenation of moral and physical evil, 
and the everlasting necessity by which sin must bring forth 
death,—has mostly been left out of thought by the broachers 
and teachers of perfectibility. Perceiving that man’s out¬ 
ward relations appeared to be perfectible, they fancied that 
his nature was so likewise : or rather they scarcely heeded 
his nature, and lookt solely at his outward relations. They 
saw that his dominion over the external world seemed to 
admit of an indefinite extension. They saw that his 
knowledge of outward things had long been progressive; 
that vast stores had been piled up, which were sure to 
increase, and could scarcely be diminisht. So, by a not 
unnatural confusion, they assumed that the greater amount 
of knowledge implied a proportionate improvement in the 
faculties by which the knowledge is acquired; although a 
I large empire can merely attest the valour of those who won 
it, without affording evidence either way with regard to 
those who inherit it. All the while too it was forgotten that 
a man’s clothes are not himself, and that, if the spark of life 
in him goes out, his clothes, however gorgeous, must sink 
and crumble upon his crumbling body. 

The strange inconsistency is, that the very persons who 
have indulged in the most splendid visions about the 
perfectibility of mankind, have mostly rejected the only 
principle of perfectibility which has ever found place in man, 
the only principle by which man’s natural corruptibility has 
even been checkt, the only principle by which nations or 
individuals have ever been regenerated. The natural life of 
nations, as well as of individuals, has its fixt course and 
term. It springs forth, grows up, reaches its maturity, 
decays, perishes. Only through Christianity has a nation 
ever risen again : and it is solely on the operation of 
Christianity that we can ground anything like a reasonable 
hope of the perfectibility of mankind ; a hope that what has 
often been wrought in individuals, may also in the fulness of 
time be wrought by the same power in the race. u. 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


297 


I met this morning with the following sentences. 

“ An upholsterer nowadays makes much handsomer furni¬ 
ture than they made three hundred years ago. The march 
of mind is discernible in everything. Shall religion then be 
the only thing that continues wholly unimproved ? ” 

What ? Does the march of mind improve the oaks of the 
forest ? does it make them follow its banners to Dunsinane, 
or dance, as Orpheus did of old h does it improve the 
mountains 1 does it^improve the waves of the sea ? does it 
improve the sun 1 The passage is silly enough : I merely 
quote it, because it gives plain utterance to a delusion, which 
is floating about in thousands, I might say in millions of 
minds. Some things we improve; and so we assume that 
we can improve, and are to improve all things ; as though it 
followed that, because we can mend a pen, we can with the 
same ease mend an eagle’s wing ; as though, because nibbing 
the pen strengthens it, paring the eagle’s wings must 
strengthen them also. People forget what things are pro¬ 
gressive, and what improgressive. Of those too which are 
progressive, they forget that some are borne along according 
to laws independent of human control, while others may be 
shoved or driven on by the industry and intelligence of man. 
Nay, even among those things with which the will and wit 
of man might seem to have the power of dealing freely, are 
there none which have not kept on advancing at full speed 
along with the march of mind 1 Where are the churches 
built in our days, which are so much grander and more 
beautiful than those of York and Salisbury, of Amiens and 
Cologne, as to warrant a presumption that they who can 
raise a worthier house for God, are also likely to know God, 
and to know how to worship him better ? 

In one point of view indeed we do improve both the oaks 
and the mountains, both the sea and even the sun; not in 
themselves absolutely, but in their relations to us. We 
make them minister more and more to our purposes; and 
w T e derive greater benefits from them, which increase with 
the increase of civilization. In this sense too may we, and 
ought we to improve religion; not in itself, but in its 








298 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


relations to us ; so that it may do us more and more good, 
or, in other words, may exercise a greater and still greater 
power over us. That is to say, we are to improve ourselves, 
in the only way of doing so effectually : we are to increase 
the power of religion over us, by obeying it, by submitting 
our wills to it, by receiving it into our hearts with more 
entire devotion and love. u * 

Every idea, when brought down into the region of the 
empirical understanding, and contemplated under the rela¬ 
tions of time and space, involves a union of opposites, which 
are bound together and harmonized in it: or rather, being 
one and simple in its own primordial fulness, it splits, when 
it enters into the prismatic atmosphere of human nature. 
Thus too is it with Christianity, from whatever point of 
view we regard it. If we look at it historically, it is at once 
unchangeable and changeable, at once constant and progres¬ 
sive. Were it not unchangeable and constant, it could not 
be the manifestation of Him who is the same yesterday, 
today, and for ever. Were it not changeable and pro¬ 
gressive, it would not be suited to him with whom today is 
never like yesterday, nor tomorrow like today. Therefore 
it is both at once ; one in its essence and changeless, as 
coming from God ; manifold and variable in its workings, as 
designed to pervade and hallow every phase and element of 
man’s being, his thoughts, his words, his deeds, his imagina¬ 
tion, his reason, his affections, his duties. For it is not an 
outward form : it is not merely a law, manifesting itself by 
its own light, cast like a sky around man, and guiding him 
by its polar constellations : its light comes down to him, 
and dwells with him, and enters into him, and, mingling 
with and strengthening his productive powers, issues forth 
again in blossoms and fruits. Accordingly, as those powers 
are various, so must the blossoms and fruits be that spring 
from them. 

If we compare our religious writers, ascetical or doctrinal, 
with those of France or Germany, we can hardly fail to 
perceive that, in turning from one nation to another, we are 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


299 


opening a new vein of thought : so remarkably and cha¬ 
racteristically do they differ. I am not referring to the 
errours, Romanist or rationalist, with which many of our 
continental neighbours are tainted : independently of these, 
each picks out certain portions of the truth, such as are 
most congenial to the temper of his own heart and mind. 
Nor is he wrong in doing so : for the aim of Christianity is 
not to stifle the germs of individual character, and to bring 
down all mankind to a dead level. On the contrary, it 
fosters and developes the central principle of individuality 
in every man, and frees it from the crushing burthen 
with which the lusts of the flesh and the vanities of life 
overlay it ; as we may observe from the very first in the 
strongly markt characters of Peter and James and John 
and Paul. 

So too, if we compare the religious writers of the present 
day with those who lived a hundred years ago,—or these 
with the great divines of the seventeenth century,—or these 
with the Reformers,—or these with the Schoolmen and the 
mystics of the middle- ages,—or these with the Latin 
Fathers, or with the Greek,—we must needs be struck by a 
number of peculiarities in the views and feelings of each age. 
The forms, the colouring, the vegetation change, as we pass 
from one zone of time to another: nor would it require a 
very nice discrimination to distinguish, on reading any 
theological work, to what age of Christianity it belongs. 
Doctrines are differently brought forward, differently mast: 
some become more prominent than they have hitherto been, 
while others fall into the background. New chains of 
logical connexion are drawn between them. New wants are 
felt; new thoughts and feelings arise; and these too need 
to be hallowed. The most powerful and living preachers 
and writers have ever been those, who, full of the spirit of 
their own age, have felt a calling and a yearning to bring 
that spirit into subjection, and to set it at one with the 
spirit of Christ. 

In this manner Christianity also becomes subject to the 
law of change, to which Time and all its births bow down. 








300 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


In a certain sense too the change is a progress; that is to 
say, in extent. Christianity is ever conquering some new 
province of human nature, some fresh national variety of 
mankind, some hitherto untenanted, unexplored region of 
thought or feeling. The star-led wisdom of the East came 
to worship the Lord of Truth, as soon as he appeared upon 
earth : and already in Paul and John do we see how the 
reason of man is transfigured by the incarnation of the 
Eternal Word. At Alexandria it was attempted to shew 
what system of truths would arise from this union of the 
human reason with the divine : and ever since, from Origen 
down to Schleiermacher and Hegel and Schelling, the highest 
endeavour of the greatest philosophers has been to Chris¬ 
tianize their philosophy; although in doing so they have 
often been deluded into substituting a fiction of their own, 
some phantom of logical abstractions, or some idol of a 
deified Nature, for the living God of the Gospel. Errours of 
all kinds have indeed beguiled Philosophy by the w r ay : yet 
the inmost desire of her soul has ever been to celebrate her 
atonement with Religion : and often, when she has gone 
astray after the lusts of the world, this has been in the 
bitterness of her heart, because the misjudging sentinels of 
Religion, instead of inviting and welcoming her and cheering 
her on, reviled her and drove her away. Hence too, in those 
ages when she has been too fast bound in scholastic chains, 
she has been wont to utter her plaint in the broken sighs of 
the mystics. 

“ Throughout the history of the Church (says Neander, in 
the introduction to his great work), we see how Christianity 
is the leaven that is destined to pervade the whole lump of 
human nature.” The workings of this leaven he traces out 
with admirable skill and beauty, and in a spirit combining 
knowledge with faith and love in a rare and exquisite union. 
Indeed the setting forth of this twofold manifestation of 
Christianity, in its constancy and in its progressiveness, is 
the great business of its historian. For such a history pre¬ 
cious hints are to be found in the Letters recently publisht 
on the Kingdom of Christ, one of the wisest and noblest 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 301 

works that our Church has produced since the Ecclesiastical 
Polity. Whereas the common run of Church-historians are 
wont to disregard one of the two elements ; either caring 
solely for that which is permanent in Christianity, without 
attending to its progressiveness ; or else degrading it into a 
mere human invention, which man is to mould and fashion 
according to the dictates of his own mind. 

After all it must never be forgotten that an increase in 
extent is very different from an increase in intensity. Like 
every other power, Religion too, in widening her empire, may 
impair her sway. It has been seen too often, both in philosophy 
and elsewhere, that, when people have fancied that the world 
was becoming Christian, Christianity was in fact becoming 
worldly. u. 

The tendency of man, we have seen, is much rather to 
believe in the corruptibility, than in the perfectibility of his 
nature. The former is the idea embodied in almost every 
mythology. It is the idea to which Poetry is led by the con¬ 
trast between her visions and the realities of life. It is the 
idea prompted by man’s consciousness of his own helplessness, 
of his own caducity and mortality, of his own sinfulness, 
and of his utter inability to contend against the powers of 
nature, against time, against death, and against sin. Per¬ 
haps too, as in looking back on the past we are fonder of 
dwelling, whether with thankfulness or regret, on the good 
than on the evil that has befallen us, so conversely in our 
anticipations of the future fear may be stronger than hope. 
At least it is- so with persons of mature years : and only of 
late have the young usurpt the right of determining public 
opinion. Even in those ages when men had the best grounds 
for knowing that in sundry things they surpast their ances¬ 
tors, they were still disposed of old to look rather at the 
qualities in which they conceived themselves to have degene¬ 
rated ; and they deemed that the accessions in wealth or 
knowledge were more than counterbalanced by the decay of 
the integrity, simplicity, and energy, which adorned the av8pes 
yiapadcovdfxa^oi. In this there may have been much exagge- 




302 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


ration, and no little delusion; but at all events it is a 
unanimous protest lifted up from every quarter of the earth, 
by all nations and languages, against the notion of the per¬ 
fectibility of mankind. 

The opposite belief, that there is any point of view from 
which mankind can be regarded as progressive, so that the 
regular advances already made may warrant a hope that 
afterages will go on advancing in the same direction, seems 
to have been originally excited by the progress of science, and 
to have been confined thereto. Perhaps it may have been by 
the Romans,—on whom such a vast influx of knowledge 
poured in, as if to make amends for the downfall of every¬ 
thing else, in the latter ages of the republic, and the earlier of 
the empire,—that such a notion was first distinctly entertained. 
Thucydides was indeed well aware that Greece had been 
increasing for centuries in power and wealth and civilization; 
and he strongly urges that the events of his own time are 
superior in importance to any former ones. More than once 
too he explicitly asserts the law, which is tacitly and practic¬ 
ally recognized by all men, that, according to the constitu¬ 
tion of human nature, we may count that the future will 
resemble the past. But the calamities of which he was a 
witness, seemed rather to forebode the destruction of Greece, 
than its attaining to any higher eminence; and the Greek 
mind had not learnt to digest the thought that barbarians 
could become civilized. It was not till the age of Polybius 
that this confession was extorted by the spreading power of 
Borne. Nor was it possible for the Greeks to conceive, how 
the various elements of their nationality, which were so 
beautiful in their distinctness, would be fused together, like 
the Corinthian brass in the legend, by their destroyers, to 
become the material of a bulkier and massier, though less 
graceful and finely proportioned state. Their philosophers 
speculated about the origin and growth of civil society, the 
primary institution of governments, and the natural order in 
which one form passes into another: but they too saw 
nothing in the world before their eyes, to breed hope -with 
regard to the future ; and Plato avows that, through the 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


303 


frailty of man, even his perfect commonwealth must contain 
the seeds of its own dissolution. 

The theory of a cycle in which the various forms of govern¬ 
ment succeed one another, is adopted by Polybius ; who feels 
such confidence in it as to declare (vi. 9), that by its help a 
man, judging dispassionately, may with tolerable certainty 
prognosticate what fortunes and changes await any existing 
constitution. He goes no further however than to lay down 
(vi. 51), that in the life of a state, as in that of an individual, 
there is a natural order of growth, maturity, and decay. 
Men were still very far from the idea that, while particular 
states and empires rise and fall, the race is slowly but steadily 
advancing along its predestined course. Indeed near two 
thousand years were to pass away, before this idea could be 
contemplated in its proper light. It was necessary that the 
human race should be distinctly regarded as a unit, as one 
great family scattered over the world. It was necessary that 
the belief in particular national gods should be superseded 
by the faith in the one true God, the Father of heaven and 
earth. It was necessary that we should be enabled to take 
a wide, discriminating, catholic survey of all the nations that 
have ever risen above the historical horizon; and that we 
should have learnt not to look upon any of them as wholly 
outcast from the scheme of God’s providence ; that we should 
be convinced how each in its station has had a part to act, a 
destiny to fulfill. 

Even Science as yet could hardly be said to exhibit a 
growing body of determinate results : nor was there anything 
like a regular progress in it anterior to the Alexandrian 
school. Among the Roman men of letters, on the other 
hand, we find the progressiveness of science asserted as a 
law. Ne quis desperet saecula projicere semper , says Pliny 
(ii. 13). The same assurance is declared by Seneca in the 
well-known conclusion of his Natural Questions. Veniet tem- 
pus, quo ista quae nunc latent , in lucem dies extrahat, et longi- 
oris aevi diligentia.—Veniet tempus, quo posteri nostri tam 
aperta nos nescisse mirentur.—Multa saeculis tunc futuris cum 
memoria nostri exoleverit , reservantur.—Non semel quaedam 











304 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


sacra traduntur: Eleusis servat quod ostendat revisentibus. 
Rerum natura, sacra sua non simul tradit. Initiates nos cre- 
dimus: in vestibulo ejus haeremus. These sentences, even 
after deducting what must always be deducted on account of 
the panting and puffing of Seneca’s shortbreathed broken- 
winded style, still shew a confidence of the increase of know¬ 
ledge, which was hardly to be found in earlier times. It is 
worth noting that this confidence, both in him and in Pliny, 
is inspired by the discoveries in astronomy ; which, Whewell 
remarks (Hist, of the Ind. Sci. i. 90), was “ the only progres¬ 
sive science produced by the ancient world.” With regard 
to maritime discovery a like confidence is exprest in those 
lines of the chorus in the Medea : 

Yenient annis saecula seris, 

Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum 

Laxet, et ingens pateat tellus ; 

Tethysque novos detegat orbes ; 

Necsit terris ultima Thule : 

lines evidently belonging to a later age than that of Ovid, 
to whom the Medea has without sufficient warrant been 
ascribed. It must have afforded some consolation to those 
who lived when the old world was sinking so fast into its 
grave, and when its heart and soul and mind all bore tokens 
of the deadly plague that was consuming it, to see even this 
brighter gleam in the distance. Even this, I say : for the 
prospect of the progress of science was not connected with 
that of any general improvement of mankind. On the con¬ 
trary Seneca combines it in strange contrast with the increase 
of every corruption. Tarde magna proveniunt. Id quod 
unum toto agimus animo , nondum perfecimus , ut pessimi 
essemus. Adhuc in processu vitia sunt . He was not so intoxi¬ 
cated with the fruit of the tree of knowledge, as to fancy, 
like the sophists of later times, that it was the fruit of the 
tree of life. On the contrary he pronounces that the earth 
will be overflowed by another deluge, and that every living 
creature will be swallowed up ; and that then, on the retreat 
of the waters, every animal will be produced anew, dabiturque 
terris homo inscius scelerum. Sed illis quoque innocentia non 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


305 


durabit, nisi dum novi sunt. Cito nequitia subrepit: virtus 
diffidlis inventu est , rectorem ducemque desiderat. Etiam sine 
magistro vitia discuntur : (Nat. Quaest. iii. 30). 

Nor could the perfectibility of mankind gain a place 
among the dreams of the middle ages. The recollections of 
the ancient world had not so entirely past away : the frag¬ 
ments of its wreck were too apparent : men could not but 
be aware that they were treading among the ruins of a much 
more splendid state of civilization. It is true, human nature 
was not at a standstill during that millenary. A new era 
was preparing. Mighty births were teeming in the womb ; 
but they were as yet unseen. Men were laying the founda¬ 
tions of a grander and loftier edifice : but this is a work 
which goes on underground, which makes no show; and the 
labourers themselves little knew what they were doing. 
Even in respect of that which raised them above former 
ages, their purer faith, while the spirit of that faith casts 
down every proud thought, and stifles every vain boast, they 
were perpetually looking back, with shame and sorrow for 
their own falling off, to the holiness and zeal of the primitive 
Christians. Indeed, as by our bodily constitution pain, 
however local, pierces through the whole frame, and almost 
disables us for receiving any pleasurable sensations through 
our other members, thereby warning us to seek for an im¬ 
mediate remedy ; so have we a moral instinct, which renders 
us acutely sensitive to the evils of the present time, far 
more than to those of the past; thus rousing us to strive 
against that which is our only rightful foe. Our imagination, 
on the other hand, recalling and enhancing the good of the 
past, shews us that there is something to strive after, some¬ 
thing to regain. It shews us that men may be exempt from 
the evil which is galling us, seeing that they have been so. 
Moreover that which survives of the past is chiefly the good, 
evil from its nature being akin to death; and this good is in 
divers ways brought continually before us, in all that is 
precious of the inheritance bequeathed to us by our ances¬ 
tors. Every son, with the heart of a son, is thankful for 
what his father has done for him and left to him : nor will 


x 








306 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


any but an unnatural one, uncover his father’s nakedness, 
even for his own eyes to look upon it. So far indeed were 
men in the middle ages from deeming themselves better than 
their forefathers, or expecting anything like a progressive 
improvement, an opinion often got abroad that the last 
days were at hand, and that the universal unprecedented 
corruption was a sign and prelude of their approach. 

The great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen¬ 
turies, which opened one world after another to men’s eyes, 
and taught them at length to know the nature and compass 
of the earth and of the heavens, might indeed have awakened 
presumptuous thoughts. But Luther at the same time threw 
open the Bible to them. He opened their eyes to look into 
the moral and the spiritual world, and to see more clearly 
than before, how the whole head was sick, and the whole 
heart faint. The revival of letters too, while it opened the 
ancient world to them, almost compelled them to acknow¬ 
ledge that in intellectual culture they were mere barbarians 
in comparison with the Greeks and Romans : and for a long 
time men’s judgements were spellbound, as Dante’s was by 
Virgil, so that they vailed their heads, as before their masters, 
even when their genius was mounting above them. Hence 
the belief that mankind had degenerated became so preva¬ 
lent, that Hake will, in the first half of the seventeenth cen¬ 
tury, deemed it necessary to establish by a long and elaborate 
induction that it was without any substantial ground. 

As he wrote early in Charles the First’s reign, before the 
close of the most powerful and brilliant age in the history of 
the human mind, one might have thought he would have 
found n6 difficulty in convincing the contemporaries of 
Shakspeare and Bacon, that men’s wits had not shrunk or 
weakened. But a genial age, like a genial individual, is 
imconscious of its own excellence. For the element and life¬ 
blood of genius is admiration and love. This is the source 
and spring of its power, its magic, beautifying wand : and it 
finds so much to admire and love in the various worlds which 
compass it around, it cannot narrow its thoughts or shrivel 
up its feelings to a paralytic worship of itself. Hakewill 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


307 


begins his Apology with declaring, that, “the opinion of the 
world’s decay is so generally received, not only among the 
vulgar, but by the learned, both divines and others, that its 
very commonness makes it current with many, without any 
further examination.” In his Preface he speaks of himself j 
as “walking in an untrodden path, where he cannot trace 
the prints of any footsteps that have gone before him; ” j 
and, to excuse the length of his book, he pleads his having j 
“ to grapple with such a giant-like monster.” Nor does even ' 
he venture beyond denying the decay of mankind. He is 
far from asserting that there is any improvement; only that 
there is “a vicissitude, an alternation and revolution” 

(p. 332), that, “ what is lost to one part is gained to another; 
and what is lost at one time, is recovered at another; 
and so the balance, by the divine providence overruling all, 
is kept upright.” “As the heavens remain unchangeable 
(he says in his Preface), so doth the Church triumphant in 
heaven’: and as all things under the cope of heaven vary and 
change, so doth the militant here on earth. It hath its 
times and turns, sometimes flowing, and again ebbing with 
the sea,—sometimes waxing, and again waning with the 
moon j which great light, it seems, the Almighty therefore 
set the lowest in the heavens, and nearest the earth, that it 
might daily put us in mind of the constancy of the one, and 
the inconstancy of the other ; herself in some sort partaking 
of both, though in a different manner,—of the one in her 
substance, of the other in the copy of her visage.” He also 
acknowledges the important truth, that, if there be any 
deterioration, it has a moral cause. But the conception of 
a melioration, of an advance, seems never to have entered 
his head. 

It is sometimes worth while to shew how recent is the 
origin of opinions, which are now regarded as incontestable 
and almost self-evident truths. The writer of a letter 
publisht by Coleridge in the Friend says (Vol. iii. p. 13): 

“ The faith in the perpetual progression of human nature 
toward perfection—will, in some shape, always be the creed 
of virtue.” Wordsworth too, in the beautiful answer in 















308 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


which he prunes off some of the excrescences of this notion, 
still gives his sanction to the general assertion : “Let us 
allow and believe that there is a progress in the species 
toward unattainable perfection; or, whether this be so or 
not, that it is a necessity of a good and greatly gifted nature 
to believe it.” A necessity it is indeed for a good and highly 
gifted nature to believe that something may be done for the 
bettering of mankind, and for the removal of the evils 
weighing upon them. Else enterprise would flag and faint; 
which is never vigorous and strenuous, unless it breathe the 
mountain-air of hope. It must have something to aim at, 
some prize to press forward to. But when we look on the 
state of the world around us, there is so much to depress 
and to breed despondence,—so much of the good of former 
times has past away, so much fresh evil has rusht in,—that 
no thoughtful man will hastily pronounce his own age to be 
on the whole better than foregoing ones. Bather, as almost 
every example shews, from meditating on the evils he has 
to contend against,—on their number, their diffusion, their 
tenacity, and their power,—will he incline to deem it worse. 
And so far is the perfectibility of man from forming an 
essential article of his creed, that I doubt whether such a 
notion was ever entertained, as a thing to be realized here on 
earth, till about the middle of the last century. 

Even Bacon, the great prophet of Science, who among all 
! the sons of men seems to have lived the most in the future, 
who acknowledged that his words required an age, saeculum 
I forte integrum ad probandum, complura autem saecula ad per- 
ficiendum, and who was so imprest with this belief, that in 
his will he left “ his name and memory to forein nations and 
to the next ages,”—even he, in his anticipations of the 
increase of knowledge, which was to ensue upon the adoption 
of his new method, hardly goes beyond the declaration in 
the book of Daniel, that many shall run to and fro, and 
knowledge shall be increast. Let me quote the noble passage, 
in which, just before the close of his Advancement of Learning, 
he gives utterance to his hopes. “ Being now at some pause, 
looking back into that I have past through, this writing 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


309 


seemeth to me, as far as a man can judge of his own work, 
not much better than that noise or sound which musicians 
make while they are tuning their instruments; which is 
nothing pleasant to hear, yet is a cause why the music is 
sweeter afterward : so have I been content to tune the in¬ 
struments of the muses, that they may play who have better 
hands. And surely, when I set before me the condition of 
these times, in which Learning hath made her third visitation 
or circuit, in all the qualities thereof,—as the excellency and 
vivacity of the wits of this age,—the noble helps and lights 
which we have by the travails of ancient writers,—the art of 
printing, which communicateth books to men of all fortunes, 
—the openness of the world by navigation, which hath dis¬ 
closed multitudes of experiments and a mass of natural 
history,—the leisure wherewith these times abound, not em¬ 
ploying men so generally in civil business, as the states of 
Greece did in respect of their popularity, and the state of 
Borne in respect of the greatness of her monarchy,—the 
present disposition of these times to peace,—and the inse¬ 
parable propriety of time, which is ever more and more to 
disclose truth;—I cannot but be raised to this persuasion, 
that this third period of time will far surpass that of the 
Grecian and Boman learning.” And in the Novum Organum 
(i. cxxix.), where he enumerates the benefits likely to accrue 
to mankind from the increase of knowledge, he wisely adds, 
with regard to its moral influence : “ Si quis depravationem 

scientiarum ad malitiam et luxuriam et similia objecerit, id 
neminem moveat. Illud enim de omnibus mundanis bonis 
dici potest, ingenio, fortitudine, viribus, forma, divitiis, luce 
ipsa, et reliquis. Becuperet modo genus humanum jus suum 
in naturam, quod ei ex dotatione divina competit; et detur 
ei copia : usum vero recta ratio et sana religio gubernabit.” 

Thus far all is sound and sure. Bacon’s prophecies of the 
advance of science have been fulfilled far beyond what even 
he could have anticipated. For knowledge partakes of in¬ 
finity : it widens with our capacities : the higher we mount 
in it, the vaster and more magnificent are the prospects it 
stretches out before us. Nor are we in these days, as men 










310 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


are ever apt to imagine of their own times, approaching to 
the end of them : nor shall we be nearer the end a thousand 
years hence than we are now. The family of Science has 
multiplied : new sciences, hitherto unnamed, unthought of, 
have arisen. The seed which Bacon sowed sprang up, and 
grew to be a mighty tree ; and the thoughts of thousands 
of men came and lodged in its branches : and those branches 
spread “ so broad and long, that in the ground The bended 
twigs took root, and daughters grew About the mother tree, 
a pillared shade High overarcht. . . and echoing walks 
between ” , . , walks where Poetry may wander, and wreathe 
her blossoms around the massy stems, and where Keligion 
may hymn the praises of that Wisdom, of which Science 
erects the hundred-aisled temple. 

But Bacon likewise saw and acknowledged that Science of 
itself could not perfect mankind, and that right reason and 
pure religion were wanting to prevent its breeding evil. 
Although he had crost the stormbeaten Atlantic, over which 
men had for ages been sailing to and fro almost impro- 
! gressively, and though in the confidence of his prophetic 
intuition he gave the name of Good Hope to the headland 
he had reacht, yet, when he cast his eyes on the boundless 
j expanse of waters beyond, he did not venture, like Magellan, 
to call it the Pacific. Once indeed a voice was heard to 
announce the rising of peace on earth : but that peace man 
marred : the bringer of it he slew : and, as if to shew how 
vain such a dream is, Magellan also was slain soon after he 
i lancht out upon the sea, which in the magnanimous enthu¬ 
siasm of his joy he named the Pacific. Calm too as the 
Pacific appeared at first, it was soon found to have no 
exemption from the tempests of earth, which have been 
raging over it ever since with no less fury than they displayed 
on the Atlantic before. If Bacon’s hopes were too sanguine 
in any respect, it was in trusting that reason and religion 
would guide and direct science. He did not sufficiently 
foresee how the old idolatries would revive,—how men would 
still worship the creature, under the form of abstractions 
and laws, instead of the living, lawgiving Creator. 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


311 


Every age of tlie world has had its peculiar phase of this 
idolatry, its peculiar form and aspect, under which it has 
conceived that the powers of earth would effect what can only 
be effected by the powers of heaven. Every age has its 
peculiar interests and excellences, which it tries to render 
paramount and absolute. The delusion of the last century 
has been, that Science will lead mankind to perfection. In 
looking at the history of Science, it must strike every eye, 
that, while the growth of poetry and philosophy is organic 
and individual, the increase of science is rather mechanical and 
cumulative. Every poet, every philosopher must begin from 
the beginning. Whatever he brings forth must spring out of 
the depths of his own nature, must have a living root in his 
heart. Pindar did not start where Homer left off, and engage 
in improving upon him : the very attempt would have been a 
proof of feebleness. And what must be the madness of a man 
who would undertake to improve upon Shakspeare ! As 
reasonably might one set out to tack a pair of leaders before 
the chariot of the sun. The whole race of the giants would 
never pile an Ossa on this Olympus: their missiles would 
roll back on their heads from the feet of the gods that 
dwell there. Even Goethe and Schiller, when they meddled 
with Shakspeare, and would fain have mended him, have 
only proved, what Voltaire, and Dryden himself, had proved 
before, that “Within his circle none can walk but he.” 
Nor, when Shakspeare’s genius past away from the earth, did 
any one akin to him reign in his stead. Indeed, according 
to that law of alternation, which is so conspicuous in the 
whole history of literature, it mostly happens that a period 
of extraordinary fertility is followed by a period of dearth. 
After the seven plenteous years come seven barren years, 
which devour the produce of the plenteous ones, yet continue 
as barren and illfavoured as ever. 

Nor may a philosopher, any more than a poet, be a mere 
link in a chain : he must be a staple firmly and deeply fixt 
in the adamantine walls of Truth. If he rightly deserves 
the name, his mind must be impregnated with some of the 
primordial ideas, of life and being, man and nature, fate and 











312 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


freedom, order and law, thought and will, power and God. 
He may have received them from others; but he must 
receive them as seeds: they must teem and germinate 
within him, and mingle with the essence of his spirit, and 
must shape themselves into a new, original growth. He 
who merely takes a string of propositions from former writers, 
and busies himself in drawing fresh inferences from them, may 
be a skilful logician or psychologer, but has no claim to the 
high title of a philosopher. For in this too does philosophy 
resemble poetry, that it is not a bare act of the intellect, 
but requires the energy of the whole man, of his moral 
nature and will and affections, no less than of his under¬ 
standing. It is the ideal pole, to which poetry is the real 
antithesis; and it bears the same relation to science, as 
poetry does to history. Hence those dissensions among 
philosophers, which are so often held up as the great scandal 
of philosophy, and the like of which are hardly found in 
science. They may, no doubt, be carried on in a repre¬ 
hensible temper; that, however, belongs to the individuals, 
not to philosophy : so far as they are merely diversities, 
they may and ought to exist harmoniously side by side, as 
different incarnations of Truth. A great philosopher will 
indeed find pupils, who will be content to be nothing more; 
who will work out and fill up his system, and follow it in its 
remoter applications ; who will be satraps under him, and go 
forth under his command to push on his frontier. But if 
any among them have a philosophical genius of their own, 
they will set up after a while for themselves ; as we see in 
the history of philosophy in the only two countries where it 
has flourisht, Greece and Germany. They who have light in 
themselves, will not revolve as satellites. They do not 
continue the servants and agents of their master’s mind, 
but, like the successors of Alexander, establish independent 
thrones, and found new empires in the regions of thought. 
Hence too the other great scandal of philosophy, its impro- 
gressiveness, may easily be accounted for. The essence of 
philosophy being, not an acquaintance with empirical results, 
but the possession of the seminal idea,—the possessing it, 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 313 

and the being possest by it, in a spiritual union and identifi¬ 
cation,—it may easily happen that philosophers in early 
ages should be greater and wiser than in later ones; greater, 
not merely subjectively, as being endowed with a mightier 
genius, but as having received a higher initiation into the 
mysteries of Truth, as having dwelt more familiarly with 
her, and gazed on her unveiled beauty, and laid their heads 
in her bosom, and caught more of the inspiration ever 
flowing from the eternal wellhead E7T a.KpoTaTr]s Kvpvtyrjs 
Tro\virlhaKos "l8rjs. In fact they have no slight advantage over 
their successors, in that there are fewer extraneous, terrene 
influences to rise and disturb the serenity of their vision. 

Science, on the other hand, is little subject to similar 
vicissitudes : at least it has not been so since the days of 
Bacon. Neither in science itself, nor in that lower class of 
the arts which arise out of its practical application, has any 
individual work an enduring ultimate value, unless from its 
execution : and this would be altogether independent of its 
scientific value, and would belong to it solely as a work of 
art. In science its main worth is temporary, as a stepping- 
stone to something beyond. Even the Principia , as Newton 
with characteristic modesty entitled his great work, is truly 
but the beginning of a natural philosophy, and no more an 
ultimate work, than Watt’s steam-engine, or Arkwright’s 
spinning-machine. It may have a lasting interest from its 
execution, or from accidental circumstances, over and above 
its scientific value : but, as a scientific treatise, it was sure 
to be superseded ; just as the mechanical inventions of one 
generation, whatever ingenuity they may betoken at the 
time, are. superseded and thrown into the background by 
those of another. Thus in science there is a continual 
progress, a pushing onward : no ground is lost; and the 
lines keep on advancing. We know all that our ancestors 
knew, and more : the gain is clear, palpable, indisputable. 
The discoveries made by former ages have become a perma¬ 
nent portion of human knowledge, and serve as a stable 
groundwork to build fresh discoveries atop of them; as these 
in their turn will build up another story, and this again 






314 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


another. Thus it came to pass that, as the multitudes in 
the plain of Shinar fancied they could erect a tower, the 
summit of which should reach to heaven, in like manner the 
men of science in the last century conceived that the 
continued augmentations of science would in time raise 
them up above all the frailties of humanity. Confounding 
human nature with this particular exertion of its faculties, 
they assumed that the increase of the latter involved an 
equivalent improvement of the whole. And this mistake 
was the easier, inasmuch as scientific talents have little direct 
connexion with our moral nature, and may exist in no low 
degree without support from it. 

At all events the advance of science afforded a kind of 
sanction to the belief in a continually progressive improve¬ 
ment. Along with it came the rapid growth of wealth, and 
of the arts which minister to wealth, whether by feeding or 
by pampering it : and these naturally tend to enervate and 
epicureanize men’s minds, to “incarnate and imbrute” the 
soul, “till she quite loses The divine property of her first 
being,” to lower the dignity of thought, and to relax the 
severe purity of feeling; so that people learn to account 
happiness the one legitimate object of all aim, and that too 
a happiness derived from nothing higher than the temperate, 
harmless indulgence of our pleasurable appetites. Moreover 
the chief intellectual exploits of the eighteenth century 
consisted, not in the discovery and establishment of new 
truths, but in the exposure and rejection of certain preju¬ 
dices and superstitions, or of opinions deemed to be such. 
Now self-conceit, like every other evil spirit, delights in 
negativeness, far more than in anything positive and real. 
So the boasters went on ringing the changes on their own 
enlightenment, and on the darkness and ignorance of their 
ancestors, and cried exultingly, We are awake! we are 
awake ! not from any consciousness of active energy and 
vision, but because they had ceast to dream. 

In this manner a belief in the perfectibility of man got 
into vogue, more especially in France ; although the fearful 
depravation of morals merely bespoke his corruptibility, and 















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


315 


might rather have been thought to portend that he was 
degenerating into a brute. Rousseau indeed was seduced, 
partly by the fascination of a dazzling paradox, and partly 
by the nervous antipathies of his morbid genius, to maintain 
the deleteriousness of the arts and sciences, and that the 
only effect of civilization had been to debase man from the 
type of his aboriginal perfection. And this notion was not 
without speciousness, if the state of French society in his 
days was to be taken as exhibiting the necessary effects of 
civilization. Thus, as one extreme is ever sure to call forth 
the opposite, the deification of civilized man led to the 
setting up of an altar on mount Gerizim in honour of savage 
man ; and the age reeled to and fro between them, passing 
from the bloody rites of the one to the lascivious rites of the 
other, till the two were mingled together, and Murder and 
Lust solemnized their unhallowed nuptials in the kennel of 
the Revolution. 

Among the apostles of perfectibility, several tried to 
combine this twofold worship. They mixt up the idea of 
progressiveness, derived from the condition of civilized man, 
with a vague phantom of perfection, placed by the imagina¬ 
tion in a supposititious state of nature, a new-fangled golden 
age, anterior to all social institutions. Although every 
plausible argument for anticipating the future progressive¬ 
ness of mankind must rest on the fact, that such a hope is 
justified on the whole by the lessons of the past, they main¬ 
tained that everything had hitherto been vicious and corrupt, 
that man hitherto had only gone further and further astray, 
but that nevertheless, by a sudden turn to the right about, 
he would soon reach the islands of the blessed. Now a 
thoughtful survey of the past will indeed force us to acknow¬ 
ledge that the progress hitherto has not been uniform, nor 
always equally apparent. We must not overlook the 
numerous examples which history furnishes in proof that, 
according to the French proverb, il faut reculer pour mieux 
sauter. We are to recognize the necessity that the former 
things, beautiful and excellent as they may have been after 
their kind, should pass away, in order that the ground might 








316 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

be prepared for a more widely diffused and more spiritual 
culture. But unless we discern how, through all the revo¬ 
lutions of history, life has still been triumphing over death, 
good over evil, we have nothing to warrant an expectation 
that this will be so hereafter. Moreover, though a great 
and momentous truth is involved in the saying, that, when 
need is highest , then aid is nighest, this comfort belongs only 
to such as acknowledge that man’s waywardness is ever crost 
and overruled by a higher power. Whereas those who were 
most sanguine about the future, spurned the notion of super¬ 
human control; while they only found matter for loathing 
in the present or the past. To their minds “ old things all 
were over-old; ” and they purpost to begin altogether anew, 
and “to frame a world of other stuff.” 

Nor did this purpose lie idle. In the work of destruction 
too they prospered : not so in that of reconstruction. As 
the spirit of the age was wholly negative, as men could find 
nothing to love or revere in earth or in heaven, in time or in 
eternity, it was not to be wondered at that they set up their 
own understanding on the throne of a degraded, godless, 
chance-ridden universe. But having no love or reverence, 
they wrought in the dark, and dasht their heads against the 
laws and sanctities, to which they would not bow. It may 
be regarded as one of those instances of irony so frequent in 
history, that the moment chosen by man to assert his per¬ 
fectibility should have been the very moment when all the 
powers of evil were about to be let loose, and to run riot 
over the earth. Happiness was the idol; and lo ! the idol 
burst; and the spectral form of Misery rose out of it, and 
stretcht out its gaunt hand over the heads of the nations ; 
and millions of hearts shrank and were frozen by its touch. 
Liberty was the watchword, liberty and equality : and an 
iron despotism strode from north to south, and from east to 
west; and all men cowered at its approach, and croucht 
beneath its feet, and were trampled on, and found the 
equality they coveted in universal prostration. Peace was 
the promise ; and the fulfilment was more than twenty years 
of fierce desolating war. 




GKJESSES AT TRUTH. 


£17 


The whirlblast came ; the desert sands rose up, 

And shaped themselves : from earth to heaven they stood, 

As though they were the pillars of a temple 
Built by Omnipotence in its own honour. 

But the blast pauses, and their shaping spirit 
Is fled : the mighty columns were but sand ; 

And lazy snakes trail o’er the level ruins. 

Yet Condorcet, as is well known, even during the Reign 
of Terrour, when himself doomed to the guillotine, employed 
the time of his imprisonment in drawing up a record of his 
speculations on the perfectibility of mankind : and full of 
errour as his views are, one cannot withhold all admiration 
from a dauntlessness which could thus persevere in hoping 
against hope. 

Speculations of this sort are so remote from the practical 
common-sense and the narrowminded empiricism, which were 
the chief characteristics inherited by English philosophy 
from its master, Locke, that the doctrine of perfectibility i 
hardly found any strenuous advocate amongst us, until it 
was taken up by Godwin. The good and pious saw that 
wealth and luxury had not come without their usual train of 
moral evils; and they foreboded the judgements which those 
evils must call down. Berkeley, for instance, in one of his 
letters, quotes the above-cited lines of Horace, as about to 
be verified in the increasing depravation of the English 
people. In his Essay toward ‘preventing the Ruin of Great 
Britain , occasioned by the failure of the Southsea scheme, 
he says : “ Little can be hoped, if we consider the corrupt 
degenerate age we live in. Our symptoms are so bad, that, 
notwithstanding all the care and vigilance of the legislature, 
it is to be feared the final period of our state approaches.” 
And in his Verses on the Prospect of planting Arts and Learning 
in America , after speaking of the decay of Europe, he adds : 

Westward the course of empire takes its way : 

The first four acts already past, 

A fifth shall close the drama with the day : 

Time’s noblest offspring is the last. 

Hartley too, who, in spite of his material fantasmagoria, 
ranks high among the few men of a finer and more genial 












318 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


intellect during that dreary period, repeatedly speaks of the 
world as hastening to its end, and as doomed to perish on 
account of its excessive corruption ; and he enumerates six 
causes, “ which seem more especially to threaten ruin and 
dissolution to the present states of Christendom.” “ Chris¬ 
tendom (thus he closes his work) seems ready to assume the 
place and lot of the Jews, after they had rejected their 
Messiah, the Saviour of the world. Let no one deceive 
himself or others. The present circumstances of the world 
are extraordinary and critical beyond what has ever yet 
happened. If we refuse to let Christ reign over us as our 
Redeemer and Saviour, we must be slain before his face as 
enemies, at his second coming.” Hartley does indeed look 
forward to “the restoration of the Jews, and the universal 
establishment of Christianity, as the causes of great happi¬ 
ness, which will change the face of this world much for the 
better ” (Prop. 85): but this is a change to be wrought by a 
superhuman power, though not without human means 
(Prop. 84), and so does not lie within the range of our present 
inquiry \ any more than Henry More’s beautiful visions, or 
those of others, concerning the millennium. 

Hume, than whom few men have been more poorly 
endowed with the historical spirit, or less capable of under¬ 
standing or sympathizing with any unseen form of human 
nature, lays down in his Essay on the Rise and Progress of the 
Arts and Sciences , “ that, when the arts and sciences come to 
perfection in any state, from that moment they naturally, or 
rather necessarily decline, and seldom or never revive f a 
proposition which implies a sheer confusion of thought, as 
though the course and term of the arts and sciences were the 
same, and which he tries to support by the feeblest and 
shallowest arguments. In his Essay on Refinement in the 
Arts , he declares that “ such a transformation of mankind, as 
would endow them with every virtue, and free them from 
every vice,” being impossible, “ concerns not the magistrate, 
who very often can only cure one vice by another .” Such is the 
paltry morality, the miserable self-abandonment, to which 
utilitarianism leads. Recognizing nothing as good or evil in 















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


319 


itself, it will foster one vice, to counteract what it deems a 
more hurtful one. He too has what he calls an Idea of a 
perfect Commonwealth: but it deals merely with the form of 
the government, being drawn up with the purpose of avoiding 
the errours into which Plato and Sir Thomas More, he says, 
fell, in making an improvement in the moral character of the 
people an essential part of their Utopias. Yet what would 
be the worth of a perfect commonwealth without such an 
improvement % or what its stability 1 Hume’s name still 
excites so much terrour, that it might be well if some able 
thinker and reasoner were to collect a century of blunders ! 
from his Essays: nor would it be difficult to do so, even 
without touching upon those which refer to questions of 
taste. 

The belief in perfectibility would indeed have chimed in 
with many of the prevailing opinions on other subjects ; 
with that, for instance, which stript the idea of God of his 
moral attributes, or resolved them into partial expressions of 
infinite benevolence; as well as with the corresponding 
opinion which regards evil as a mere defect, and entirely 
discards the sinfulness of sin. For, were evil nothing but an 
accident in our nature, removable by human means, it would 
argue a cowardly distrust, not to believe that the mind, 
which is achieving such wonders in spreading man’s empire, 
intellectual and material, over the outward world, will be 
able to devise some plan for subduing his inward foe. Yet 
the Essay on Political Justice does not seem to have produced 
much effect even at the time, in the w r ay of conviction, 
except on a few youthful enthusiasts; though it added no 
little to the consternation among the retainers of the existing 
order of things. So deplorable however was the dearth of 
thought in England after the death of Burke, that, while 
Godwin’s deeper fallacies were scarcely toucht by his oppo¬ 
nents, they buoyed themselves up with the notion that he 
had been overthrown by the bulkiest instance of an iynoratio 
elenchi in the whole history of pseudo-philosophy,—the 
Essay on Population; a work which may have merits in 
other respects, but which, with reference to its primary 












320 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


I 




object, the refutation of Condordet and Godwin, is utterly 
impotent; all its arguments proceeding on a hypothesis 
totally different from that which it undertakes to impugn; 
as has been convincingly shewn by the great logician of our 
times in one of the Notes from the Pocketbook of an English 
Opium-eater. Indeed I hardly know whether the success of 
the Essay on Population, in dispelling the bright visions of a 
better state of things, be not a stronger argument against 
the perfectibility of man, than any contained in its pages; 
evincing as that success does such a readiness to adopt any 
fallacy which flatters our prejudices, and bolsters up our 
imaginary interests. 

It was in Germany that the idea of the progressiveness of 
mankind first revealed itself under a form more nearly 
approaching to the truth : which indeed might have been 
expected from the peculiar character of the nation. As the 
Germans surpass other nations in the power of discerning 
and understanding the spirits of other climes and times, they 
have been the first to perceive the true idea of the history 
of the world in its living fulness and richness : and, here, as 
in other departments of knowledge, it is only by meditating 
on the laws observable in the past, that we can at all prog¬ 
nosticate the future. 

What then is the true idea of the history of the world ? 
That question may now be answered briefly and plainly. 
For though it may take thousands of years to catch sight of 
an idea, yet, when it has once been clearly apprehended, it is 
wont to manifest itself by its own light. The generic dis¬ 
tinction between man and the lower orders of animals, if we 
look at them historically,—the distinction out of which it 
arises that mankind alone have, properly speaking, a history, 
or become the agents and subjects in a series of diverse 
events,—is, that, while each individual animal in a manner 
fulfills the whole purpose of its existence, nothing of the sort 
can be predicated of any man that ever lived, but only of the 
race. All the organs and faculties with which the animal is 
endowed, are called into action : all the tendencies discover¬ 
able in its nature are realized. Whereas every man has a 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


321 


number of dormant powers, a number of latent tendencies, 
the purpose of which can never be accomplisht, except in 
the historical development of the race ; not in the race as 
existing at any one time, nor even in the whole of time past, 
but of the race as diffused through the whole period of time 
allotted to it, past, present, and to come. For thus much j 
we can easily see, that there are many purposes of man’s 
being, many tendencies in his nature, which have never yet 
been adequately fulfilled; though we are quite unable to 
make out when that fulfilment will take place, or whither it 
will lead us. Moreover there is a universal law, of which 
we have a twofold assurance,—both from observation of all 
the works of nature, and from the wisdom of their author,— 
that no tendency has been implanted in any created thing, 
but sooner or later shall receive its accomplishment,—that 
God’s purposes cannot be baffled, and that his word can never 
return to him empty. Hence it follows that all those 
tendencies in man’s nature, which cannot be fulfilled imme¬ 
diately and contemporaneously, will be fulfilled gradually 
and successively in the course which mankind are to run. 
Accordingly the philosophical idea of the history of the 
world will be, that it is to exhibit the gradual unfolding of 
all the faculties of man’s intellectual and moral being,— 
those w T hich he has in common with the brute animals, may 
be brought to perfection at once in him, as they are in 
them,—under every shade of circumstance, and in every 
variety of combination. This development in the species 
will proceed in the same order as it is wont to follow in those 
individuals whose souls have been drawn out into the light 
of consciousness. In its earlier stages the lower faculties 
will exercise a sway only disturbed now and then by the 
awakening of some moral instinct; and then by degrees will 
be superseded and brought into subjection by those of a 
higher order, coming forward first singly, and then con¬ 
jointly ; with a perpetual striving after the period when the 
whole man shall be called forth in perfect harmony and 
symmetry, according to Aristotle’s definition of happiness, 
as ^vxrjs cvepyeui kclt aperrjv reXeiau. In a word, the purpose 












! 322 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

| 

! and end of the history of the world is to realize the idea of 
humanity. All the while too, as in the outward world there 
is a mutual adaptation and correspondence between the 
course of the seasons, and the fruits they are to mature, so 
may we feel assured that, at every stage in the progress of 
history, such light and warmth will be vouchsafed to mankind 
from above, as they may be able to bear, and as their tem- 
j porary needs may require. 

I know not whether this idea was ever fully and explicitly 
enunciated by any writer anterior to Hegel. Indeed it 
presupposes a complete delineation of the process by which 
the human mind itself is developt, such as is hardly to be 
found prior to his Phenomenology. Even by Hegel the his¬ 
torical process is regarded too much as a mere natural 
evolution, without due account of that fostering super¬ 
intendence by which alone any real good is elicited. But 
the idea was already rising into the sphere of vision above 
half a century ago, and has been contemplated since then 
under a variety of particular. aspects. Lessing, in one of 
his latest, most precious, and profoundest works,—a little 
treatise written in 1780, in which, after having with much 
| labour purged himself from the naturalism and empiricism 
of his contemporaries, he reaches the very borders of a 
Christian philosophy,—speaks of revelation in its several 
stages as the gradual education of the human race. His 
prophecy, that the time of a new everlasting Gospel will 
come, may indeed startle those who are unacquainted with 
the deplorably effete decrepit state of the German church in 
his days : and had he not lived in an unbelieving age, he 
would have recognized, like Luther, that the Gospel which 
we have already, is at once everlasting and ever-new : else 
| the spirit of his prophecy has been in great measure 
accomplisht of late years, by the revival of religion, and the 
restoration of the old Gospel to much of its former power 
and majesty. 

Herder, who treated the philosophy of history in his 
greatest work, and who made it the central object of all his 
studies, yet, owing to the superficialness of his metaphysical 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


323 

knowledge, had but vague conceptions with regard to the 
progress of mankind. He had discerned no principle of 
unity determining its course and its end. His genius was 
much happier in seizing and describing the peculiarities of 
the various tribes of mankind, more especially in their less 
cultivated state, when almost entirely dependent on the 
circumstances of time and place : and such contemplations 
were better suited to the sentimental pantheism, into which 
the spirit of the eighteenth century recoiled from the formal 
monotheism it had inherited, which had found its main 
utterance in Rousseau, and with which Herder was much 
tainted, like many of the more genial minds of his age, and’ 
of those since. 

Kant on the other hand, looking at history in its ordinary 
political sense, lays down, in a brief but masterly essay 
publisht in 1784, that the history of the human race, as a 
whole, may be regarded as the fulfilling of a secret purpose 
of nature to work out a perfect constitution ; this being the 
only condition in which all the tendencies implanted in man 
can be brought to perfection. In a later essay, in 1798, he 
remarks, with his characteristic subtilty, that, even if we 
assume the human race to have been constantly advancing 
or receding hitherto, this will not warrant a conclusion that 
it must necessarily continue to move in the same direction 
hereafter ; for that it may have just reacht a tropical point, 
and may be verging on its perihelion, or its aphelion, from 
which its course would be reverst. Hence he looks about 
for some fact, which may afford him a surer ground to argue 
on : and such a fact he finds in the enthusiastic sympathy 
excited throughout Europe by the outbreak of the French 
Revolution. This gives him a satisfactory assurance that 
the human race will not only be progressive hereafter, but 
has always been so hitherto. Perhaps a subtilty far inferior 
to Kant’s might shew that this argument is not so very 
much sounder than every other which may be drawn from 
the history of the world. But his writings in his later years 
betray that the vigour of his faculties was declining : and 
one of the ways in which the great destroyer was at times 







324 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


pleased to display his power, was by building a house on 
the sand, after razing that on the rock. It was thus that, 
having swept away every antecedent system of ethics, he 
spun a new one out of his categorical imperative. 

During the last fifty years, the idea of history as an 
organic whole, regulated by certain laws inherent in the 
constitution of man,—as a macrocosm analogous to the 
microcosm contained in every breast,—has been a favourite 
subject of speculation with the Germans. There are few 
among their eminent writers who have not occasionally 
thrown out thoughts on the subject: many have treated it, 
either partially or in its totality, in distinct works : and it 
has been applied with more or less ability and intelligence 
to the history of religion, of philosophy, of poetry, and of 
the arts. In each it has been attempted to arrange and 
exhibit the various phenomena which are the subjects of 
history, not in a mere accidental sequence, after the practice 
of former times and of other countries, but as connected 
parts of a great whole,—to trace what may be called the 
metamorphoses of history, in their genesis and orderly suc¬ 
cession. Of late too these theories have been imported into 
France, especially by the Saint-Simonians, but have mostly 
been frenchified during the journey, and turned into stiff 
coarse abstractions : added to which the national incapacity 
to contemplate an idea, makes the French always impatient 
to realize it under some determinate form; instead of 
acknowledging that it can only be realized, when it realizes 
itself, and that it may do this under any form, if it be duly 
instilled into the mind as a living principle of thought. 

From what has been said, we may perceive that the 
progress of mankind is not in a straight line, uniform and 
unbroken. On the contrary it is subject to manifold vicis¬ 
situdes, interruptions, and delays ; ever advancing on the 
whole indeed, but often receding in one quarter, while it 
pushes forward in another; and sometimes even retreating 
altogether for a while, that it may start afresh with greater 
and more irresistible force. Wordsworth compares it to 
“ the progress of a river, which both in its smaller reaches 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


325 


and larger turnings is frequently forced back toward its 
fountains by objects which cannot otherwise be eluded or 
overcome : yet with an accompanying impulse, that will I 
ensure its advancement hereafter, it is either gaining strength 
every hour, or secretly conquering some difficulty, by a 
labour that contributes as effectually to further it in its I 
course, as when it moves forward uninterrupted in a direct 
line.” It is like the motion of the earth, which, beside its j 
yearly course round the sun, has a daily revolution through 
successive periods of light and darkness. It is like the 
progress of the year, in which, after the blossoms of spring 
have dropt off, a long interval elapses before the autumnal 
fruits come forward conspicuously in their stead : and these 
too anon decay ; and the foliage and herbage of one year 
mixes up with the mould for the enriching of another. It 
is like the life of an individual, in which every day adds 
something, and every day takes away something : but it by 
no means follows that what is added must be more valuable 
than what is taken away. u. 

When coupled with a right understanding of its object, 
the belief in the progressiveness of mankind has no ten¬ 
dency to foster presumption; which in its ordinary accept¬ 
ation it is apt to do. For the narrowminded and ignorant, 
being unable to project their thoughts beyond their own 
immediate circle, or to discriminate between what is really 
essential and valuable in any state of society, and what is 
accidental and derives its importance solely from habit, are 
prone to assume that no condition can well be endurable 
except their own, and to despise those who are unfortunate 
enough to differ from them, even in the cut of their coats, 
as so many Goths or Hottentots. In fact, this is the usual, 
as well as the original, meaning of 'the word barbarian: a 
barbarian is a person who does not talk as we talk, or dress 
as we dress, or eat as we eat ; in short, who is so audacious 
as not to follow our practice in all the trivialities of manners. 
No doubt too there are people to whom it is quite incom¬ 
prehensible, how all the world did not die of weariness and 














! $26 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

intellectual starvation in the days when there were no news¬ 
papers, or stagecoaches, or circulating libraries, or penny 
encyclopedias. Now such persons grow very proud and loud, 
when they fancy they have a philosophical proposition to 
back their pretensions : forthwith they enlist as drummers, 
to beat the march of mind. And beat it they do deafeningly, 
at every corner of a street, in an age of a superficial cha¬ 
racter, like the present, the advantages of which strike every 
eye, while they keep us from looking at anything beyond,— 
from observing the poisonous vermin that swarm amid the 
luxuriant rank vegetation, the morass it grows out of, and 
the malaria it breeds. 

It is true, this results in part from that instinctive power 
by which habit attaches us to whatever we are accustomed 
to ; thus, by a wise and beneficent ordinance, adapting our 
nature to the endless varieties of our condition and circum¬ 
stances, and enabling us to find happiness wheresoever we 
may be placed. Here, as in so many other cases, it is by 
“ overleaping itself, and falling on the other side,” by passing 
I out of its own positive region into that of negativeness, that 
a feeling, in itself sound and wholesome, becomes erroneous 
and mischievous. At the same time, in so doing it perverts 
and belies itself. For it is no way necessary that a fondness 
for any one object should so turn the current of our affections, 
as to draw them away from all others ; still less that it 
should sour them against others. On the contrary, love, 
when true and deep, opens and expands the heart, and fills 
it with universal goodwill. Whereas exclusiveness, of what¬ 
soever kind, arises from the monopolizing spirit of selfishness. 
They who look contemptuously upon other things, in com¬ 
parison with the chosen objects of their regard, do so not 
from any transcendent affection for those objects in them¬ 
selves, but merely as the objects which they vouchsafe to 
honour ; and because they think it ministers to their glory 
to sip the cream of the whole earth, while the rest of man¬ 
kind are fain to swallow the skim-milk. In such a temper 
of mind there is no pure, hearty satisfaction, no pure, 
hearty delight even in the very objects thus extolled. If a 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


327 


person is really at ease, and thoroughly contented with his 
own state, he will be glad that his neighbours should feel a 
like contentment in theirs. Thus patriotism becomes the 
ground, and indeed is the only sure ground, of cosmopolitism. 

When we call to remembrance however, that the course 
of time is markt, not by the rectilinear flight, but by the 
oscillations and pulsations of life,—that life does not flow in 
a straight, conspicuous stream into its ocean-home, but sinks 
sooner or later into the subterraneous caverns of death,— 
that light does not keep on brightening into a more intense 
effulgence, but, in compassion to the infirmity of our organs, 
allows them to bathe ever and anon and seek refreshment 
in darkness,—that the moral year, like the natural, is not 
one continued spring and summer, but has its seasons of 
decay, during which new growths are preparing,—that the 
ways of Providence in this world, as crost and interrupted 
by the self-will of man, are not solely from good to better, 
but often, in a merciful condescension to our frailty, through 
evil to good,—we shall understand that a more advanced 
stage of civilization does not necessarily imply a better state 
of society, least of all in any one particular country ; which, 
it is possible, may already have played out its part, and be 
doomed to fall, while others rise up in its stead. Indeed so 
far is our superiority to our ancestors from being a self- 
evident, notorious truth, the best of all proofs of our being 
superior to them would be our not thinking ourselves so. 

Nay, even if the progress were uniform and continuous, 
what plea should we have for boasting 1 or how can we dare 
pride ourselves on a superiority to our ancestors, which we 
owe, not to our own exertions, but to theirs ? how can we 
allow that superiority to awaken any feeling, except of the 
awful responsibility it imposes on us, and of reverent grati¬ 
tude to those through whose labours and endurance we have 
been raised to our present elevation ? 

That an acknowledgement of the inferiority of our own 
times is no way inconsistent with the firmest assurance as to 
the general progressiveness of mankind, may be seen in the 
Lectures on the Character of the Age delivered by Fichte at 










828 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Berlin in 1804. After laying down, as the scheme of the 
history of our world, that mankind are to be trained to render 
that entire obedience to the law of reason as a freewill- 
offering, which in their primitive state they rendered uncon¬ 
sciously to the instinct of reason,—he divides the life of the 
human race into five distinct periods, and describes the 
present or third period, as “ the epoch of man’s emancipation 
immediately from all binding authority, and mediately from 
all subjection to the rational instinct, and to reason alto¬ 
gether under every shape,—the age of absolute indifference 
to all truth, and of utter unrestraint without any guidance,— 
the state of complete sinfulness.” At the same time he 
declared that this dismal transition-period,—for drawing the 
features of which he found abundant materials in the poli¬ 
tical, moral, and religious debasement of Germany at the 
close of the last and the beginning of the present century,— 
was verging on its close ) and that mankind would shortly 
emerge from this lowest deep into the state of incipient jus¬ 
tification. With all his perversities he was a noble, heroic 
patriot, great as a philosopher, and still greater as a man : 
and one rejoices that he lived long enough to see, what he 
would deem a sign that his hopes were about to be fulfilled, 
the enthusiastic spirit which animated regenerate Germany 
in 1813. 

Thus, while a right understanding of the course and pur¬ 
pose of history must needs check our bragging of the ad¬ 
vantages of our own age, neither will it allow us to murmur 
on account of its defects. What though the blossoms have 
dropt off 1 ? the fruit will not ripen without. What though 
the fruit have fallen or been consumed h so it must,—seeing 
that it cannot keep its freshness and flavour for ever,—in 
order that a new crop may be produced. Surely it is idle 
to repine that a tree does not stand through the year with a 
load of rotten apples. Precious as may have been the qua¬ 
lities or the institutions which have past away, we shall 
recognize that their subsistence was incompatible with the 
new order of things ; that the locks which curl so gracefully 
round the downy, glowing cheeks of the child, would ill 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


329 


become the man’s furrowed brow, and must grow white in 
time; but that then too they will have a beauty of their 
own, if the face express that sobriety and calmness and purity 
which accord with them ; and that every age in the life of a 
nation, as of an individual, has its advantages and its benefits, 
if we call them forth, and make a right use of them. For 
here too, unless we thwart or pervert the order of Nature, a 
principle of compensation is ever working. It is in this 
thought that Tacitus finds consolation ( Annal . iii. 55) : Nisi 
forte rebus cunctis inest quidam velut orbis, ut quemadmodum 
temporum vices, ita morum vertantur: nec omnia apud priores 
meliora; sed nostra quoque aetas multa laudis et artium 
imitanda posteris tulit. 

Above all, he who has observed how throughout history, 
while man is continually misusing good, and turning it into 
evil, the overruling sway of God’s Providence out of evil is 
ever bringing forth good, will never be cast down, or led to 
despond, or to slacken his efforts, however untoward the 
immediate aspect of things may appear. For he will know 
that, whenever he is labouring in the cause of heaven, the 
powers of heaven are working with him ; that, though the 
good he is aiming at may not be attainable in the very form 
he has in view, the ultimate result will assuredly be good; 
that, were man diligent in fulfilling his part, this result would 
be immediate ; and that no one, who is thus diligent, shall 
lose his precious reward, of seeing that every good deed is a 
part of the life of the world. u. 

Another advantage attending the true idea of the progress 
of mankind is, that it alone enables us to estimate former 
ages justly. In looking back on the past, we are apt to fall 
into one of two errours. One class of historians treat the 
several moments of history as distinct, insulated wholes, 
existing solely by themselves and for themselves, apart 
from all connexion with the general destinies of mankind. 
Another class regard them as so many steps in the ladder 
by which man had to mount to his present station. Now 
both these views are fallacious, the last the most so. For 







330 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


the former may coexist with a lively conception of individual 
reality, and contains nothing necessarily disparaging to the 
men of bygone generations ; though it will not! aid us to 
discern their relative bearings and purposes. Whereas, in 
ascending a ladder, we think the steps were merely made to 
get up by, not to rest on \ we seldom pause to contemplate 
the varying prospects which spread out successively before 
each ; and by a scarcely avoidable delusion, everything above 
us being hidden in mist, we mistake our own landingplace 
for the summit, and fancy the ladder was set up mainly for 
us, in order that we might climb it. Yet our post may be 
less commanding than several lower ones: some fresh obstacle 
may have come across us, to narrow our field of view : or our 
highth itself may render the obj ects indistinct. At all events, 
when we are looking down on them, we are unable to make 
out their proportions, and only perceive how they are con-, 
nected with each other, not what they are in themselves. 
Indeed the other unphilosophical class of historians are also 
liable to a similar mistake. Not having a right insight 
into the necessary distinctions of ages and nations, they too 
measure others by their own standard, and so misunderstand 
and misjudge them. 

In this, as in every idea, there is a union of opposites. 
Man, whether in his individual, or in his corporate capacity, 
is neither to be regarded solely as the end of his own being, 
nor solely as a mean and instrument employed for the well¬ 
being of others,—nor again as partly one and partly the 
other,—but as both at once, and each wholly. Nay, so inse¬ 
parable is this twofold office, and indivisible, that he cannot 
rightly fulfill either, except by fulfilling the other. He has 
a positive and significant part to act in the great drama of 
the world’s life : and that part derives a double importance 
from not being designed to pass away like a dream, but to 
leave a lasting impression on the destinies and character of 
the race. Moreover it is by diligently performing the part 
assigned to him, by topping it, as the phrase is, that he does 
his utmost to forward the general action of the drama. So 
that, to understand any past age, we should consider it in a 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


331 


twofold light; first gain the fullest and most definite con¬ 
ception of its peculiar features and character; and then con¬ 
template it with reference to the place it holds in the history 
of the world. What was it ? and what did it accomplish ? 
These are the first questions : but others follow them. 
How came it to be what it was ? how did it arise out of what 
went before ? and what did it leave to that which came after? 
What phase of human nature did it express ? what distinc¬ 
tive idea did it embody ? what power did it realize ? of what 
truths was it the exponent ? and what portion of these 
its attributes has past away with it ? what portion has 
been taken up and incorporated with the living spirit of 
the race ? 

Let me exemplify these remarks by the manner in which 
the history of philosophy has been treated. A number of 
writers, of whom Brucker may stand as the representative, 
have aimed at little else than giving a naked abstract or 
summary of the successive systems which have prevailed ; 
translating the terminology into that of their own days; but 
with scarcely a conception that every system of philosophy, 
deserving the name, has an organic inward, as well as a logical 
and outward unity, and springs from a seminal idea ; or that 
there is an orderly genesis by which one system issues from 
another. Yet, seeing that philosophy is the reflexion of the 
human mind upon itself, on its own nature and faculties, and 
on those supersensuous ideas and forms which it discovers 
within itself, the laws and mould of its being, the history of 
philosophy, it is plain, must be the history of the human 
mind, must follow the same regular progression, and go 
through the same transmigrations. Viewed in this light, 
the history of philosophy has a pervading unity, and a deep 
interest, and is intimately connected with the life' of the 
race. But in its usual form it merely exhibits a series of 
logical diagrams, which seem to be no way concerned with 
the travails and throes of human nature,—which are nothing 
more than the images of Narcissus looking dotingly at himself 
ever and anon in the stream of Time,—and which “ come 
like shadows, so depart,” until we are wearied by the dull, 






GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


332 

ghastly procession, and cry, with Macbeth, We ll see no 
more. 

Inadequate however and tantalizing as such a history is, it 
does at least furnish an outline of the forms under which Philo¬ 
sophy has manifested itself: it shews us how multifarious those 
forms are, and supplies us with some of the materials for 
discerning the law of their succession. We perceive in it 
how the appetite of unity has ever been the great charac¬ 
teristic of the Philosophical mind, and how that mind has 
ever been drawn by an irrepressible instinct to bring all 
things to one, and to seek the central fc One in all. Hence 
these histories are of greater value, or at least come nearer 
to fulfilling the idea of a history, than such detacht obser¬ 
vations as Dugald Stewart has strung together for the sake 
of exhibiting a view of the progress of metaphysical philo¬ 
sophy. From the latter no one would be able to frame any 
conception of the systems enumerated, unless he were already 
acquainted with them. Indeed one should hardly make out, 
except from the objections urged every now and then against 
the love of system, that there is anything like a desire of unity 
in the philosophical spirit, any aim beyond certain more or 
less wide generalizations from the phenomena of the intel¬ 
lectual and material world. Instead of trying to give a 
faithful representation of former systems in their indivi¬ 
duality, and their reciprocal connexion, pointing out the 
wants they were successively designed to satisfy, shewing 
how those wants arose, and how they could not but arise, 
and then tracing the evolution of each pervading idea, he has 
mostly contented himself with picking out a few incidental 
remarks, and these often no way pertaining to the general 
scheme of systematic thought, but such reflexions as are 
suggested to an acute and intelligent mind by observation of 
the world. The object which guides him in the selection of 
these remarks, is, to shew how the philosophers of former 
times caught glimpses of certain propositions, which he deems 
to be the great truths of his own age : and he almost seems 
to have fancied that the human mind had been heaving and 
panting and toiling from the beginning, and ransacking the 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


333 


quarries of Nature, and building up the mighty pyramid of 
thought, in order that Reid should lay on the headstone, and 
take his stand on the summit. Hereby a method, which is 
solely applicable to the history of science, is transferred to 
that of philosophy. Whereas the worth of a philosophical 
system is only to be appreciated in its unity and integrity, 
not from two or three casual remarks; which are a still 
more fallacious criterion, than detacht passages are of the 
merit of a poem. For the power of drawing inferences from 
observation is totally distinct from that of discerning ele¬ 
mentary ideas, and is often found without a particle of it; 
for instance in those who by way of eminence are termed 
men of practical minds. u. 


I have been trying to shew that the belief in the per¬ 
fectibility, or even in the progressiveness of mankind, is a 
late growth in the world of thought,—to explain how and 
under what form it originated, and how much of errour has 
been mixt up with it. Are we then to cast away the idea 
of perfectibility, as an idle, baseless, delusive, vainglorious 
phantom 1 God forbid ! And in truth he has forbidden it. 
He forbad it, when He set His own absolute perfection as 
the aim of our endeavour before us, by that blessed com¬ 
mand —Be ye 'perfect, even as your Father in heaven is 
perfect. 

To deny the perfectibility of mankind is to charge these 
words with pompous inanity. They declare that the perfect 
renewal of God’s image in man is not a presumptuous vision, 
not like a madman’s attempt to clutch a handful of stars, 
but an object of righteous enterprise, which we may and 
ought to long for and to strive after. And as God’s commands 
always imply the possibility of their fulfilment, and impart 
the power of fulfilling them to those who seek it, this, which 
was designed for all mankind, was accompanied by another, 
providing that all mankind should be called to aspire to that 
sublime perfection, should be taught by what steps they are 
to mount to it, and should receive help mighty enough to 
nerve their souls for the work. A body of men was instituted 







334 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


for the express purpose of teaching all nations to do all the 
things that Christ had commanded, and of baptizing them in 
the name of Him who alone can give man the power of sub¬ 
duing whatever there is of evil in his nature, and of maturing 
whatever there is of good. 

Be ye perfect , even as your Father in heaven is perfect. This 
is the angel-trumpet which summons man to the warfare of 
Duty. This, and nothing less than this, is the glorious 
prize set before him. Do our hearts swell with pride at 
the thought that this is what we ought to be, what we 
might be 1 A single glance at the state of the world, at 
what we ourselves are, must quench that pride, and turn it 
into shame. u * 

When quoting Dryden’s epigram on Milton, (p. 292) I 
called it stupid. Is this an indecorous expression to apply 
to anything that comes from so renowned a writer ? I would 
not willingly fail in due respect to any man of genius, who 
has exercised his genius worthily: but I cannot feel much 
respect for the author of Limberham , who turned Milton’s 
Eve into a vulgar coquette, and who defiled Shakspeare’s 
State of Innocence by introducing the rottenhearted carnalities 
of Charles the Second’s age into the Tempest. As to his 
epigram on Milton, it seems to me nearly impossible to pack 
a greater number of blundering thoughts into so small a 
space, than are crowded into its last four lines. Does the 
reader remember it ] 

Three poets, in three distant ages born, 

Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. 

The first in loftiness of thought surpast; 

The next in majesty : in both the last. 

The force of Nature could no further go : 

To make a third, she joined the former two. 

As these lines are on the author of Paradise Lost , we know 
who must be the other poets spoken of: else we should 
hardly divine it from the descriptions given of them ; which 
would fit any other writers nearly as well. For what feature 
of the Homeric poems is designated by “loftiness of 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


335 


thought ? ” what feature of Virgil by “ majesty ,”—majesty 
contradistinguisht from loftiness of thought ? What is lofti¬ 
ness of thought in a poet as existing without majesty? 
what majesty, without loftiness of thought ? unless it be the 
majesty of Lewis the Fourteenth’s full-bottomed wig, or of 
one of Dry den’s own stage-kings. For, if there be not 
something incongruous in these two qualities, if they had 
already coexisted in Homer and Virgil, what is the prodigy 
of their union in Milton ? How totally are the characters 
of the two poets mist in these words ! They give no notion, 
or a most erroneous one, of Homer ; and a very inadequate 
one of Virgil. Milton however is so highly favoured, that 
he unites both qualities. His “ majesty ” is not, like Virgil’s, 
without “ loftiness of thought; ” nor his “ loftiness of 
thought,” like Homer’s, without “majesty.” 

And the combination of these two elements, which are 
almost identical, exhausts the powers of Nature ! This is 
one of the blustering pieces of bombast thrown out by those 
who neither know nor think what they are talking of. 
Eschylus, and Sophocles, and Pindar, and Aristophanes, and 
Dante, and Cervantes, and Shakspeare had lived,—every 
one of them having more in common with Homer than 
Milton had: yet a man dares say, that the power of God has 
been worn out by creating Homer and Virgil ! and that he 
could do nothing after, except by strapping them together. 

Nor can there well be more complete ignorance of the 
characteristics of genius. Secondary men, men of talents, 
may be mixt up, like an apothecary’s prescription, of so 
many grains of one quality, and so many of another. But 
genius is one, individual, indivisible : like a star, it dwells 
alone. That which is essential in a man of genius, his 
central spirit, shews itself once, and passes away, never to 
return : and in few men is this more conspicuous than in 
Milton, in whom there is nothing Homeric, and hardly any¬ 
thing Virgilian. In sooth, one might as accurately describe 
the elephant, as being made up of the force of the lion and 
the strength of the tiger. 

A like inauspicious star has presided at the birth of many 







336 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

of the epigrams on great men. The authors of them, in 
their desire to say something very grand and striking, have 
been regardless of truth and propriety. What can be more 
turgid and extravagant than Pope’s celebrated epitaph on 
Newton 'l in which he audaciously blots out all the know¬ 
ledge of former ages, that he may give his hero a dark ground 
to stand out from; forgetting that in the intellectual world 
also the process of Nature is not by fits and starts, but 
gradually,—that the highest mountains do not spring up out 
of the plain, but are approacht by lower ranges,—and that 
no sun ever rises without a preluding twilight. 

The best parallel to Pope’s couplet,—for it is scarcely a 
parody,—is Nicolai’s silly one on Mendelsohn : 

Es ist ein Gott: so sagte Moses schon : 

Doch den Beweis gab Moses Mendelsohn. 

Which may be Englisht without much disparagement by the 
following doggerel: 

There is a God, said Moses long ago : 

But Moses Mendelsohn first proved ’twas so. 

Far more ingenious than any of the preceding epigrams, 
—because it contains a thought, though a false one,—is 
Bembo’s on Raphael : 

Ille hie est Raphael, timuit quo sospite vinci 
Rerum magna parens, et moriente mori. 

Yet, neat and clever as this may be, a true imagination 
would revolt from charging Nature either with jealousy or 
with despondency. She may be endowed with the purer 
elementary feelings of humanity. She may be represented 
as sympathizing with man, as rejoicing with him or at him, as 
mourning with him or over him. But surely it is absurd 
that she, who is here called rerum magna parens, she who 
brings forth all the beauty and glory of mountains and 
vallies, of lakes and rivers and seas, of winter and spring and 
summer,—she, who every evening showers thousands of 
stars over the sky, who calls the sun out of his eastern 
chamber, and welcomes him with bridal blushes, and leads 




GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


337 


him across the heavens,—she who has gone on for thousands 
of years pouring forth bright and graceful forms with inex¬ 
haustible variety and prodigality,—she who fills the 
immensity of space with beauty, and is ever renewing it 
through the immensity of time,—should be ruffled by a 
petty feeling of rivalry for one of her children; or should 
fear that the power, which had seen countless generations 
and nations, and even worlds, rise and set, was about to 
expire, because one of her blossoms, although it was one of 
the loveliest, had dropt off from the tree of humanity. 

In all these eulogies we find the same trick. The authors 
think they cannot sufficiently exalt the persons they want to 
praise, except by speaking derogatorily and slightingly of 
some other power. Nature is vilified, to magnify Milton 
and Raphael; all the science from Archimedes down to 
Kepler and Galileo, for the sake of glorifying Newton. In 
the same style is Johnson’s couplet on Shakspeare : 

Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign ; 

And panting Time toiled after him in vain. 

What the latter of these two monstrous lines was intended 
to mean, it is difficult to guess. For, even Johnson’s 
grandiloquence could hardly have taken this mode of 
expressing that Shakspeare violated the unities. The former 
line is one of the most infelicitous ever written. Not to 
speak of that uncouth abstraction, Existence , which is here 
turned into a person, and deckt out with eyes; what dis¬ 
tinguishes Shakspeare above all other poets, is, that he did 
not “ spurn Existence’s bounded reign.” He was too wise 
to dream that it was bounded, too wise to fancy that he 
could overleap its bounds, too wise to be ambitious of taking 
a salto mortale into Chaos. His excellence is that he never 
“ spurns ” anything. More than any other writer, he realizes 
his own conception of the philosophic life,— 

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 

Sermons in stones, and good in everything. 

People are fond of talking about the extravagances of 
genius, the exaggerations of the imagination; and when 









338 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


they meet with something very extravagant and exaggerated, 
they regard this as a proof that the writer’s imagination was 
so violent and uncontrollable, it quite ran away with him. 
One might as well deem gouty legs symptomatic of strength 
and agility. Exaggerations mostly arise from feebleness 
and torpour of imagination. It is because we feel ourselves 
unable to vivify an object in its full, calm reality, that we 
mouthe and sputter. When Caligula was making pre¬ 
parations for a triumph over an enemy he had never 
seen, Galliarum procerissimum quemque, et, at ipse dicebat , 
a£io6pian$tvTov legit , ac seposuit ad pompam (Suetonius, c. 47) : 
and so it is with big words that authors have been wont to 
celebrate their factitious triumphs. Of the writers I have 
been citing none was remarkable for imaginative power : 
even Dryden was not so : in Johnson the active, productive 
imagination was inert, the passive or receptive, sluggish and 
obtuse. His strength lay in his understanding, which was 
shrewd and vigorous, and at times sagacious. Yet no poet 
of the rankest, most ill-regulated imagination ever wrote 
anything more tumid than this couplet on Shakspeare. 

To show how a poet of true and mighty imagination will 
praise, let me wind up these remarks by quoting Milton’s 
noble epitaph. 

What needs my Shakspeare for his honoured bones 
The labour of an age in piled stones ? 

Or that his hallowed relics should be hid 
Under a star-ypointed pyramid ? 

Dear son of memory, great heir of fame. 

What needst thou such weak witness of thy name ? 

Thou in our wonder and astonishment 
Hast built thyself a live-long monument; 

And so sepulcred in such pomp dost lie, 

That kings for such a tomb would wish to die. 

The reader may perhaps remind me, that this epitaph, as 
written by Milton, contained six more lines ; and that these 
are quite unworthy of the others, and prove that the greatest 
poets may at times write in very bad taste. True ! the 
epitaph was composed in Milton’s youth ; and a young poet 
of genius is always liable,—the more so on account of that 
lively susceptibility which is among the chief elements of all 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


339 


genius, to be carried away by the vicious taste of his age. 
He must receive the impressions of the world around him, 
before he can mould them into a world of his own. In 
omitting the six lines in question, I have followed the 
example set by Wordsworth in his Essay on Epitaphs. Bad 
however as the conceit in them may be, the fault is not one 
of vapid bombast, but of an unripe genius, of an over-active 
ingenuity. The words are not big, unmeaning sounds, as in 
the lines quoted from Dryden, Pope, and Johnson. Milton’s ! 
epitaph, though it has a flaw in it, is a genuine diamond, 
and, when that flaw is cut out, shines in lasting brilliancy : 
while the others are bits of painted glass, gaudy and glaring, 
but which, if you handle them rudely, split into worthless 
fragments. Or rather they are swollen bladders : only prick i 
them, and they collapse, and cannot be puft out again. u. 

-- - 

When searching into the hidden things of God, we are for 
ever forgetting that we only know in part a . 


Christianity has carried civilization along with it, whither¬ 
soever it has gone : and, as if to shew that the latter does 
not depend on physical causes, some of the countries the 
most civilized in the days of Augustus are now in a state of 
hopeless barbarism. 


Something like Judaism or Platonism, I should think, 
must always precede Christianity ; except in those who have 
really received Christianity as a living power in their child¬ 
hood. 


The catholic religion is the whole Bible : sects pick out 
a part of it. But what whole 1 The living whole, to be 
sure . . not the dead whole : the spirit, not the letter. a. 

Mere art perverts taste ; just as mere theology depraves 
religion. 


It is a lesson which Genius too y and Wisdom of every kind 














340 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


i must learn, that its kingdom is not of this world. It must 
learn to know this, and to be content that this should be so, 
to be content with the thought of a kingdom in a higher, 
less transitory region. Then peradventure may the saying 
I be fulfilled with regard to it, that he who is ready to lose 
his life shall save it. The wisdom which aims at something 
nobler and more lasting than the kingdom of this world, 
may now and then find that the kingdom of this world will 
also fall into its lap. How much longer and more widely 
has Aristotle reigned than Alexander! with how much more 
power and glory Luther than Charles the Fifth ! His breath 
still works miracles at this day. u. 

Unless a tree has borne blossoms in spring, you will vainly 
look for fruit on it in autumn. u. 

In character, in affection, the ideal is the only real. 

— 

There is but one power to which all are eager to bow 
down, to which all take pride in paying homage; and that 

is the power of Beauty. u. 

-- 

Science sees signs ; Poetry the thing signified. u. 

If Painting be Poetry’s sister, she can only be a sister 
Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the 
other bodies forth a troop of horsemen with drawn sabres 
and white-plumed helmets. i. 


A work of genius is something like the pie in the nursery 
song, in which the four and twenty blackbirds are baked. 
When the pie is opened, the birds begin to sing. Hereupon 
three fourths of the company run away in a fright; and 
then after a time, feeling ashamed, they would fain excuse 
themselves by declaring, the pie stank so, they could not sit 
J near it. Those who stay behind, the men of taste and 
epicures, say one to another, We came here to eat. What 
business have birds , after they have been baked , to be alive and 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


341 


singing ? This will never do. We must put a stop to so 
dangerous an innovation : for who will send a pie to an oven f if 
the birds come to life there ? We must stand up to defend the 
rights of all the ovens in England. Let us have dead birds . . 
dead birds for our money. So each sticks his fork into a bird, 
and hacks and mangles it a while, and then holds it np and ! 
cries, Who will dare assert that there is any music in this bird!s 
song ? 


Let your humour always be good humour, in both senses. 

If it comes of a bad humour, it is pretty sure not to belie 
its parentage. xj. 

Shakspeare’s genius could adapt itself with such nicety to 
all the varieties of ever-varying man, that in his Titus 
Andronicus he has portrayed the very dress of mind which 
the people of the declining empire must have worn. I can 
conceive that the degenerate Homans would clothe their 
thoughts in just such words. The sayings of the free- 
garmented folks in Julim Cesar could not have come from 
the close-buttoned generation in Othello. Though human | 
passions are the same in all ages, there are modifications of 
them dependent on the circumstances of time and place, 
which Shakspeare has always caught and exprest. He has 
thus given such a national tinge and epochal propriety to his 
characters, that, even when one sees Jaques in a bag-wig 
and sword, one may exclaim, on being told that he is a 
French nobleman, This man must have lived at the time when 
the Italian taste was prevalent in France. How differently 
does he moralize from King Henry or Hamlet! although 
their morality, like all morality, comes to pretty nearly the 
same conclusion. i. 


He who is imprest with the truth of the foregoing remark, 
must needs feel somewhat perplext, when reading Troilus 
and Cressida, at the language which is there put into the 
mouths of the Greek chiefs : so utterly unlike is it to the 
winged words of the Iliad. Hence some of the critics have 















342 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


had recourse to the usual makeshift, by which they try to 
shirk difficulties, when they cannot get over them, and have 
conjectured that the play was interpolated by some other 
poet of the age. But what other poet could have furnisht 
the wisdom contained in those very speeches, the style of 
which appears the most objectionable ? And what would 
the play be without them ? Indeed the language in question 
is not confined to a few speeches, but runs through almost 
all the graver scenes. Still it is strange that Shakspeare, 
who, with a humble and magnanimous trust in truth, repre¬ 
sented everything just as it was or had been, merely bring¬ 
ing out the spirit which in real life had been checkt or 
latent, should in this instance have departed so far from his 
original, that he is scarcely ever so unlike Homer, as here 
where he comes in contact with him. To describe the style 
of the Greek debates by one of his own illustrations : 

Knots, by the conflux of meeting sap, 

Infect the sound pine, and divert his grain 
Tortive and errant from his course of growth. 

It looks just as if Shakspeare had chosen for once to let his 
thoughts travel by his friend Chapman’s heavy wagon : 
such is the similarity between the language of the Greek 
scenes and that of Bussy d'Ambois and Chapman’s other 
serious writings. And doubtless this furnishes the key to 
the difficulty. Shakspeare’s acquaintance with Homer w T as 
through Chapman’s translation; a considerable part of 
which was publisht some years before Troilus and Cressida. 
Hence Agamemnon and Ulysses talk with him just as Chap¬ 
man had made them talk, and just as Shakspeare would 
naturally suppose that they had talkt in Greek. 

Perhaps this may help us toward the solution of another 
difficulty in this perplexing play. Coleridge, who confesses 
that he scarcely knows what to say of it, and that “ there is 
no one of Shakspeare’s plays harder to characterize,” has 
seldom been less happy in his criticisms than in his remarks 
on the Greek chiefs. Nor is Hazlitt less wide of the mark, 
when he observes that “ Shakspeare seems to have known 
them as well as if he had been a spy sent into their camp.” 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


343 


At least his representation of them is totally different in 
tone and spirit from Homer’s ; as indeed must needs follow 
from the difference in their language : for Shakspeare was 
always alive, in a higher degree than any other poet, to the 
truth of the maxim, le style est Vhomme meme. Yet I cannot 
think that the difference has been correctly apprehended by 
j Coleridge, when he says that “ Shakspeare’s main object was 
to substantiate the distinct and graceful profiles or outlines 
of the Homeric Epic, into the flesh and blood of the romantic 
drama.” Assuredly the Homeric heroes are not mere grace¬ 
ful outlines : they are every whit as substantial, living flesh 
and blood as Shakspeare’s: only their moral nature is 
simpler, and flows more uniformly and continuously, without 
such a whirl and eddy of thoughts and feelings. Tieck, who 
in a note to his edition of the German Shakspeare, also 
observes that among all the plays Troilus and Cressida is 
unquestionably the most singular, calls it, “ a heroic comedy, 
a tragic parody, written with the set purpose of parodying 
the age of chivalry, the profound political wisdom which 
overleaps itself, the shows of love, and even misfortune.” 
These words seem to express the real character of the play. 
But still the question recurs : how came Shakspeare thus to 
parody the Homeric heroes 1 how came he to conceive and 
represent them with all this ostentation and hollowness, ever 
trying to cheat and outwit each other, yet only successful in 
cheating and outwitting themselves ? Now this, it seems to 
me, may not improbably be owing in great measure to the 
medium through which he saw them, and by which- they 
were so much swelled out and distorted, that his exquisite 
taste might well take offense at such pompous phraseology 
in the mouth of simple warriors : while the combination of 
great political sagacity, and shrewdness and depth, more 
especially in general reflexions, with hollowness of heart, and 
weakness of purpose, was what he saw frequently exemplified 
among the statesmen of his own age. Though Agamemnon 
and his peers were certainly not meant as a satire on James 
and his court, yet they have sundry features in common, u. 









344 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


A poet, to be popular, ought not to be too purely and 
intensely poetical. He should have plenty of ordinary 
poetry for the multitude of ordinary readers : and perhaps it 
may be well that he should have some poetry better than 
ordinary, lest the multitude should be daunted by finding 
themselves entirely at variance with the intelligent few. 
This however is by no means clear. He who calls to mind 
the popularity of the Pleasures of Hope , may remark that 
the artificial flowers in a milliner’s window do not want any 
natural ones to set them off; and that a star looks very pale 
and dull, when squibs and rockets are shining it out of 
countenance. In truth this has just been the case with 
Gertrude of Wyoming , which has been quite thrown into the 
shade by its gaudier, flimsier neighbour. 

I have known several persons, to whom no poem of Words¬ 
worth’s gave so much pleasure as the Lines written while 
sailing m a boat at evening ; which were composed, as he has 
told me, on the Cam, while he was at College. 0, if he had 
but gone on writing in that style! many will say, what a 
charming poet he would have been ! For these are among the 
very few verses of Wordsworth’s, which any other person 
might have written; that is, bating the purity and delicacy 
of the language, and the sweetness of the versification. The 
sentiment and the exercise of fancy are just raised so much 
above the temperature of common life, as to produce a 
pleasant glow : and there is nothing calling for any stretch 
of imagination or of thought • nothing like what we so often 
find in his poems, when out of Nature’s heart a voice 
“ appears to issue, startling The blank air." 

In like manner I have been told that, among Landor’s 
Conversations , the most general favorite is that between 
General Kleber and some French oflicers. If it be so, one 
may easily see why. Beautiful as some touches in it are, it 
is not so far removed as most of its companions, from what 
other men have written and can write. 

No doubt there is also another reason,—that this Conver¬ 
sation has something of a story connected with it. For in 
mere incidents all take an interest, through the universal 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


345 


fellowfeeling which binds man to man ; as is proved by the 
fondness for gossiping, from which so few are exempt. Above 
all is such an interest excited by everything connected, I 
however remotely, with the two great powers which come 
across the path of life,—death, which terminates it,— 
and love, which, to the imagination even of the least 
imaginative, seems to carry it for a while out of the high¬ 
way dust, into the midst of green fields and flowers. Hence 
it is that all tatlers delight in getting hold of anything akin 
to a love-story ; not merely from a fondness for scandal, but 
because the most powerful and pleasurable of human feelings 
is in some measure awakened and excited thereby. 

Nor is it at all requisite to the excitement of interest by 
incidents, that the persons they befall should have any depth 
of character or passion. On the contrary, such a surplusage 
often makes them less generally interesting. Leave out the 
thoughts and the characters in Hamlet, Lear , and Macbeth : 
as pantomimic melodrames they might perchance run against ! 
Pizarro and the Forest of Bondy. Hence the popularity of j 
novels ; the name of which implies some novel incident; 
and the interest of which mostly arises from the entangling 
and disentangling of a love-story. Indeed this is all that 
the bulk of novel-readers care about ; who loves whom ? and j 
by what difficulties their loves are crost? and how those 
difficulties are surmounted ? and how the loveknot, after the 
tying and untying of sundry other knots, twists about at 
length into a marriageknot ? 

This too is perhaps one of the reasons why the heroes and j 
heroines of novels have so little character. They are to be 
just such persons as the readers can wish and believe them¬ 
selves to be, trickt out with all manner of insipid virtues, 
unencumbered by anything distinctive and individual. Then 
we may float along in a daydream, with a half-conscious per¬ 
suasion that all the occurrences related are happening to | 
ourselves. Hereby Poetry, instead of lifting us out of our¬ 
selves into an ideal world, brings down its world to us, and 
peoples the real world with phantoms. These delusions 
would be disperst by any powerful delineation of individual 

_ I 





346 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


character. We cannot fancy ourselves Lear, or Macbeth, or 
Hamlet; although on deeper reflexion we perceive that we 
are heirs of a common nature. 

In this sense it is very true, that, as one of our greatest 
modern writers once said, incident and interest are the bane 
of poetry. For the main subject matter of poetry being 
man, the various modifications and combinations of human 
character and feelings,—the facts it treats of will be primarily 
actions, or what men do, exhibiting and fulfilling the inward 
impulses of their nature,—and secondarily events, which follow 
one another according to an apparent law, and which shew how 
the outward world runs parallel or counter to the characters, 
calling forth their dormant energies, unfolding them, shaping 
them, perfecting them. Whereas incidents are mere creatures 
of chance, unconnected, insulated, and interesting solely from 
themselves, from their strangeness, not from their moral 
influence. Such an interest being excited with far more ease, 
both by the writer and in the reader, the love of incidents 
has commonly been among the symptoms of a declining age 
in poetry ’ as for instance in Euripides, compared with Eschy- 
lus and Sophocles, in Fletcher compared with Shakspeare. 

And this is the interest which is injurious to poetry, the 
interest excited by strange incidents, and by keeping curiosity 
on the stretch. Hot that good poetry is to be uninteresting: 
but the sources of its interest lie deeper, in our inmost con¬ 
sciousness and primary sympathies. Hence it is permanent. 
While the interest awakened by curiosity fades away when 
the curiosity has once been gratified, true poetical interest, 
the interest excited by the throes and conflicts of human 
passion, is wont to increase as we become familiar with its 
object. Every time I read King Kdipus , the interest seems 
to become more intense : the knowledge of the result does 
not prevent my sympathizing anew with the terrific struggle. 
So it is in Othello. Whereas that excited by the Castle of 
Otranto, or the Mysteries of Udolpho , is nearly extinct after 
the first reading. In truth a mystery is unworthy of the 
name, unless it becomes more mysterious when we have been 
initiated into it, than it was before. TT 















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


347 


Man cannot live without a shadow, even in poetry. Poet¬ 
ical dreamers forget this. They try to represent perfect 
characters, characters which shall be quite transparent : and 
so their heroes have no flesh and blood, no nerves or muscles, 
nothing to touch our sympathy, nothing for our affections to 
cling to. xj. 

People stare much more at a paper kite, than at a real one. 

Brilliant speakers and writers should remember that coach- 
wheels are better than Catherine wheels to travel on. 


Many are ambitious of saying grand things, that is, of 
being grandiloquent. Eloquence is speaking out. . a quality 
few esteem, and fewer aim at. 


One’s first business in writing is to say what one has to say. 

Is it ? Dear me ! I never knew that. Yet I have written 
ever so many articles in the Hypo-critical Review , laying down 
the law how everybody ought to write, and scolding everybody 
for not writing accordingly. Surely too my articles must have 
been admirable; for somebody told me he admired them. u. 

The best training for style is speech; not monologues, or 
lectures ex cathedra , like those of the German professors, of 
whose uninterrupted didacticity their literature bears too 
many marks; but conversation, whence the French, and 
women generally, derive the graces of their style; dialectic 
discussion, by which Plato braced and polisht his ; and the 
agonistic oratory of the bar, the senate, and the forum, which 
makes people speak home, popularly, and to the point, as we 
see in our own best writers, as well as in those of Greece 
and Rome. For when such a practice is national, its influ¬ 
ence extends to those who do not come into immediate 
contact with it. The pulpit too woidd be a like discipline, 
if they who mount it would oftener think as much of the 
persons they are preaching to, as of the preacher. u. 













343 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


An epithet is an addition : but an addition may be an 
incumbrance; as even a dog finds out, when a kettle is tied 
to his tail. Stuff a man into a featherbed ; and he will not 
move so lightly or nimbly. The very instruments of flying 
weigh us down, if not rightly adjusted, if out of place, or 
overthick. Yet many writers cram their thoughts into what 
might not inappropriately be called a featherbed of words. 
They accumulate epithets, which weaken oftener than they 
strengthen ; throwing a haze over the objects, instead of 
bringing out their features more distinctly. For authors 
too, like all the rest of mankind, take their seats among 
Hesiod S vtjtuoi, ovSe icracriv oaco 7 r\eov rjfuav 7 ravros. 

As a general maxim, no epithet should be used, which 
does not express something not exprest in the context, nor 
so implied in it as to be immediately deducible. Above 
all, shun abusive epithets. Leave it to those who can wield 
nothing more powerful, to throw offensive words. Before 
the fire burns strongly, it smoulders and smokes : when 
mightiest and most consuming, it is also brightest and clear¬ 
est. A modern historian of the Cesars would hardly bridle 
his tongue for five lines together. In every page we should 
be called upon to abhor the perfidious Tiberius, the ferocious 
Caligula, the bloody Nero, the cruel Domitian, the tyrant, the 
monster, the fiend. Tacitus, although not feeble in indigna¬ 
tion, either in feeling or expressing it, knew that no gentleman 
ever pelts eggshells, even at those who are set up in the 
pillory : nor would he have done so at him who was pilloried 
in St Helena. 

If the narrative warrant a sentence of reprobation, the 
reader will not be slow in pronouncing it: by taking it out 
of his mouth you affront him. A great master and critic in 
style observes, that “Thucydides and Demosthenes lay it 
down as a rule, never to say what they have reason to sup¬ 
pose would occur to the auditor and reader, in consequence 
of anything said before ; knowing that every one is more 
pleased, and more easily led by us, when we bring forward 
his thoughts indirectly and imperceptibly, than when we 
elbow them and outstrip them with our own (Imagin 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


349 


Corners, i. 129). Perhaps, as is often the case in criticism, a 
practice resulting from an instinctive sense of beauty and fit¬ 
ness may here be spoken of as a rule, the subject of a con¬ 
scious purpose : and when it becomes such, and is made a 
matter of elaborate study, the practice itself is apt to be 

| carried too far, and to produce a zigzag style, instead of a 
smooth, winding flow. For the old saying, that ars est celare 
artem , is not only applicable to works, but in a still more 
important sense to authors j whose nature will never be 
bettered by any art, until that art becomes nature. Still, so 
far as such a rule tended to make our language more tempe¬ 
rate, it could hardly be otherwise than beneficial. This tem¬ 
perance too, like all temperance, would greatly foster strength. 
For we are ever disposed to sympathize with those who 
repress their passions : we even spur them on; while we 
pull in those who are run away with by theirs : and some¬ 
thing like pity rises up toward the veriest criminal, when we 
see him meet with hard words, as well as hanging. 

There is a difference however, as to the use of epithets, 
between poetry and prose. The former is allowed to dwell 
longer on that which is circumstantial and accessory. Orna¬ 
ments may become a ball-dress, which would be unseasonable 
of a morning. The walk of Prose is a walk of business, 
along a road, with an end to reach, and without leisure to do 
more than take a glance at the prospect: Poetry’s on the 
other hand is a walk of pleasure, among fields and groves, 
where she may often loiter and gaze her fill, and even stoop 
now and then to cull a flower. Yet ornamental epithets are 
not essential to poetry: should you fancy they are, read 
Sophocles, and read Dante. Or if you would see how the 
purest and noblest poetry may be painted and rouged out 
of its grandeur by them, compare Pope’s translations of 
Homer with the original, or Tate and Brady’s of the Psalms 
with the prose version. u. 

It has been urged in behalf of the octosyllabic metre, of 
which modern writers are so fond, that much of our heroic 
verse would be improved, if you were to leave out a couple of 

l___:_- 










350 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 






I 


syllables in each line. Such an argument may not betoken 
much logical precision; seeing that idle words may find a way 
into lines of eight syllables, as well as into those of ten : nor is 
there any peculiar pliancy in the former, which should render 
them the one regimental dimension, exclusively fitted to 
express all manner of thoughts. Moreover such omissions 
must alter the character of a poem, the two metres being in 
totally different keys; wherefore a change in the metre of 
the poem should superinduce a proportionate change in its 
whole structure and composition. Sorry too must be the 
verses, which could benefit by such an amputation. In 
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, it would be like im¬ 
proving a hand by chopping off a finger. If you try the 
experiment on Pope however, especially on his translation, 
you will find that line after line is the better for being thus 
curtailed. For you will get rid of many of the epithets, 
with which he was wont to eke out his couplets ; and which, 
as he seldom exerted his imagination to reproduce the con¬ 
ceptions presented by his original, were mostly selected for 
little else than their sound, and their convenience in filling 
up the vacant space. 

There is indeed a tendency in our heroic couplet, as it is 
very unaptly called, to collect idle words ; that is to say, 
according to the mode of constructing it which has prevailed 
since the middle of the seventeenth century. Gibbon, in 
some observations on Ovid’s Fasti , remarks that, in the 
elegiac metre, the necessity that “ the sense must always be 
included in a couplet, causes the introduction of many use¬ 
less words merely for the sake of the measure.” The same 
has naturally been the case in our verse, ever since it was 
laid down as a rule that there must be a pause at the end of 
every other line. u. 


Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria (i. 20), suggests that 
our vicious poetic diction “ has been kept up by, if it did 
not wholly arise from, the custom of writing Latin verses, 
and the great importance attacht to these exercises, in our 
public schools.” In this remark, too much efficacy is ascribed 
















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


351 


to what at the utmost can only have been a subordinate and 
secondary cause. For the very same vices of style have 
prevailed in other countries, where there was no such prac- | 
tice to generate and foster them. Nor in England have they 
been confined to persons educated at our public schools, but 
have been general among those who have set themselves to 
write poetry, whether for the sake of distinction, or to while 
away idle hours, or to gratify a literary taste, without any 
strong natural bent. Indeed the one great source of what 
is vicious in literature is the want of truth, under all its 
forms : while the main source of what is excellent, in style 
as well as in matter, is the pure love and desire of truth, 
whether as the object of the reason and understanding, or of 
the imagination. He who writes with any other aim than 
that of giving full utterance to the truth which is teeming 
within him,—be it with the wish of writing finely, of gaining 
fame, or of gaining money,—is sure to write ill. He who is 
ambitious of becoming a poet, when Nature never meant 
him to be so, is sure to deck himself out with counterfeit 
ornaments. 

Hence it is that translations are often injurious to litera¬ 
ture. They may indeed be highly beneficial, by promoting 
that commerce of thought, which is the great end of the 
intercourse among nations, and of which the lower mercantile 
commerce should be the symbol and the instrument. Very 
often however a translator goes through his work as a job : 
and even when he has entered upon it spontaneously, he will 
mostly grow weary after a while, and continue it merely as 
taskwork. Whether from natural inaptitude, or from ex¬ 
hausted interest, he makes no steady, strenuous endeavour 
to realize the conceptions of his author, and to bring them 
out vividly and distinctly, even before his own mind. But 
he has put on harness, and must go on. So he writes vaguely 
and hazily, tries to make up for the feebleness and incorrect¬ 
ness of his outlines, by daubing the picture over with gaudy 
colours; and getting no distinct perception of his author’s 
meaning, nor having any distinct meaning of his own, he falls 
into a noxious habit of using words without meaning. 






352 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


For the same reason will the practice of writing in a 
forein language be mischievous, and to the same extent ; so 
far namely as it leads us to use words without a distinct, 
living meaning, and to have some other object paramount to 
j that of saying what we have to say, in the plainest, most- 
forcible manner. An author may indeed exercise himself 
not without profit in writing Latin j and as people learn to 
j walk with more grace and ease by learning to dance, he may 
I return to his own language with his perceptions of beauty 
I and fitness in style sharpened by the necessity of attending 
| to the niceties of a forein tongue, in which all composition 
! must needs be the work of art. Our principal Latin poets 
! have been among the best and most elegant English writers 
of their time,—Cowley, Addison, Sir William Jones, Cowper, 
j Landor : and though Milton was over-ambitious of emulating 
powers and beauties scarcely compatible with the genius of 
our language, his scholarship led him to that learned mastery 
I over it, in which he stands almost alone. 

But when Latin verses are to be written as a prescribed 
| tas k>—when, according to the custom of many schools, boys 
are prepared for this accomplishment by being set in the first 
instance to write what are professedly 'nonsense verses , as 
though stringing long and short syllables together after a 
certain fashion had a positive value, independent of the 
subject matter,—when they are trained for years to write 
compulsorily on a theme imposed by a master,—it is not easy 
to imagine any method better calculated to deaden every 
spark of genuine poetical feeling. In its stead boys of 
quickness acquire a fondness for mere diction: this is the 
object aimed at, the prize set before them. They ransack 
Virgil and Horace and Ovid for pretty expressions, and bind 
up as many as they can in a posy : so that a copy of some 
j fifty lines will often be a cento of such phrases, and contain 
j a greater number of ornamental epithets than a couple of 
books of the Eneid. 

j To exemplify this poetical ferrumination, as he calls it, * 

| Coleridge cites a line from a prize-poem, — Lactea purpureos 
j interstrepit unda lapillos, — which, he says, is taken from a 

















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 353 

line of Politian’s,— Pur a color atos interstrepit unda lapillos ; 
adding that, if you look out purus in the Gradus, you find 
lacteus as its first synonym; and that purpureus is the first 
synonym for coloratus. They who know how little Coleridge 
is to be relied on for a mere matter of fact, will not be sur¬ 
prised to learn, that lacteus does not occur among the 
synonyms for purus in the Gradus , as indeed it scarcely 
could, nor purpureus among those for coloratus. It is worth 
noticing however, as illustrating the effects of such a process, 
that the two epithets substituted for the original ones are 
both untrue. The original line is a very pretty one, even in 
rhythm superior to the copy : but the water, though pura, 
is not lactea; nor, if it were, could the pebbles be seen 
through it : and these pebbles are colorati, of various colours, 
not, or at least only a few of them, purpurei. u. 

Most people seem to think the coat makes the gentleman; 
almost all fancy the diction makes the poet. This is one of the 
reasons why Paradise Regained has been so generally slighted. 
In like manner many readers are unable to discover that 
there is any poetry in Samson Agonistes ; and very few have 
any notion that there is more, and of 'a higher kind, than in 
Comus. Johnson for instance, while he says, that “ a work 
more truly poetical (than Comus) is rarely found; allusions, 
images, and descriptive epithets embellish almost every period 
with lavish decoration,”—as though these things were the 
essence of poetry,—complains in th q Rambler (No. 140), that 
it is difficult to display the excellences of Samson, owing to 
its “ having none of those descriptions, similies, or splendid 
sentences, with which other tragedies are so lavishly adorned.” 
So that Johnson’s taste was of that savage cast, which thinks 
that a woman’s beauty consists in her being studded with 
jewels, if confluent, so much the better ; that she can have 
no beauty at all, unless she has a necklace and frontlet and 
ear-rings; and that, if she had a nose-ring, and lip-rings, 
and cheek-rings, and chin-rings, she would be all the more 
beautiful. Even allowing that jewelry may not be always 
hurtful to female beauty, especially where there is little or 


A A 




354 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


none for it to hurt, yet there is a masculine beauty, as well 
as a feminine ; and the former at least does not need to be 
trickt out with tinsel. The oak has a beauty of its own, a 
beauty which would not be improved by being spangled over 
with blossoms. We may remark too that it is only about the 
horizon that the sky arrays itself in the gorgeous pageantry 
of sunset. The upper heavens remain pure, or at most are 
tinged with a slight blush. 

The whole of Johnson’s elaborate criticism on Samson 
Agonistes is a specimen of his manner of taking up a flower 
with the tongs, and then protesting that he cannot feel any 
softness in it,—of his giving it a stroke with his sledge¬ 
hammer, and then crying, Look ! where is its beauty ? “ This 

is the tragedy (he has the audacity to say), which ignorance 
has admired, and bigotry applauded.” u. 

Perhaps it is when the Imagination flies the lowest, that 
we see the hues of her plumage. In Coleridge’s Tabletalk 
(i. 160), it is stated that, having remarkt how the Pilgrim's 
Progress “is composed in the lowest style of English,” he 
added: “ if you were to polish it, you would destroy the 
reality of the vision : for works of imagination should be 
written in very plain language : the more purely imaginative 
they are, the more necessary it is to be plain.” I know no 
better illustration of this, than the exquisite simplicity of 
the tales in Tieck’s Phantasm ; the style of which produces 
a persuasion of their complete reality, as though the author 
were born and bred in fairy-land, talking of matters with 
which he was thoroughly familiar, so that the wonderful 
events related seem to be actually going on before our eyes. 
This was probably the reason why Coleridge, as he once said 
to me, considered Tieck to be the poet of the purest ima¬ 
gination, according to his own definition of the imagination, 
who had ever lived. 

That the loftiest aspirations of the feelings find their 
appropriate utterance in a like plainness of speech, is proved 
by the Psalms: that it is equally fitted to express the deepest 
mysteries of thought by those who have received the highest 







GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


355 


initiation into them, we see in the writings of St John. On 
the other hand fine diction is wont to bring the author into 
view. We perceive the conjuration going on, and the vapours 
rising ; which subside when the form evoked comes forth into 
distinct vision. u. 


The beauty of a pale face is no beauty to the vulgar eye. u. 

Too much is seldom enough. Pumping after your bucket 
is full prevents its keeping so. u. 

Do, and have done. The former is far the easiest. u. 


How many faithful sentences are written now ? that is, 
sentences dictated by a pure love of truth, without any wish, 
save that of expressing the truth fully and clearly,—sentences 
in which there is neither a spark of light too much, nor a 
shade of darkness. u. 


The great misfortune of the present age is, that one can’t 
stand on one’s feet, without calling to mind that one is not 
standing on one’s head. u. 

The swan on still St Mary’s Lake 
Floats double, swan and shadow. 

A similar duplicity is perpetually found in modern poetry ; 
though it is seldom characterized by a stillness like that 
of St Mary’s Lake. Even in Wordsworth himself we too 
often see the reflexion, along with the object. Look for 
instance at those fine lines on the first aspect of the French 
Revolution : 

Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth 
The beauty wore of promise,—that which sets 
(To take an image which was felt no doubt 
Among the bowers of Paradise itself) 

The budding rose above the rose full-blown. 

When reading these lines, I have always wisht that the third 
and fourth were omitted; or rather that the whole passage 
were constructed anew. For there is much beauty in the 


a a 2 















356 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


thought. There is an imaginative harmony between the 
budding rose and the time when the world was in the bud : 
although the rosebud was not yet invested with that se¬ 
condary interest which it derives from contrast, that interest 
through which the aged feel the beauty of childhood far 
more deeply than children can; and although the beauty of 
fulfilment, the beauty of the full-blown rose, is that which 
shines the most radiantly in the hopeful eyes of youth. 
Such as it is however, the thought is not duly woven into 
the context; we seem to be looking at the reverse side of 
the tapestry, with the rough ends of thread sticking out. 
It is brought in reflectively, rather than imaginatively. A 
parenthesis, where it interrupts the continuity of a single 
thought, unless there be a coincident interruption of feeling, 
is ill-suited to poetry. You will hardly improve your pearl 
by splitting it in two, and sticking a pebble between the 
halves. The very expression, to take an image , is prosaic. 
The imagination does not take images. It discerns the har¬ 
monies of things, the more latent as well as the more appa¬ 
rent : the truths which it wishes to utter, it sees written in 
manifold forms by the finger of God on the mystic scroll of 
the universe : and what it sees it speaks of, not taking, but 
receiving, not feigning that which is not, but representing 
that which is. Nor is it quite correct to say that an image 
was felt , least of all in Paradise. The inhabitants of Paradise 
did not feel images, but realities : it is since our expulsion 
from Paradise, that we have been doomed to take up our 
home in a world of shadows. And though the beauty of 
promise may have been felt there, the imagination was not 
yet so enslaved by the understanding, as to depreciate one 
kind of beauty for the sake of exalting another. 

But if Wordsworth at times has this blemish in common 
with his contemporaries, he has excellences peculiarly his' 
own. If in his pages we see both swan and shadow, in them 
at least the waters are still; 

And through her depths St Mary’s Lake 
Is visibly delighted ; 

For not a feature of the hills 
Is in the mirror slighted. 







GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


357 


In the two editions of Wordsworth’s poems publisht since 
the former one of this little book, the lines just objected to 
have been altered ; and the passage now stands thus : 

Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth, 

The beauty wore of promise,—that which sets 
(As at some moment might not be unfelt 
Among the bowers of Paradise itself) 

The budding rose above the rose full-blown. 

By this change a part of the foregoing remarks has been 
obviated : still I have not thought it necessary to cancel 
them. For their justice, so far at least, is confirmed by the 
great poet’s compliance with them : and of esthetical criti¬ 
cism that portion is the most beneficial practically, which 
discusses details with precision. General views of literature, 
whether theoretical or historical, are valuable, as enlarging 
the mind, and giving it a clew to the labyrinth, which since 
the invention of printing has been becoming more and more 
complicated every year. To authors however they have 
mostly done harm, seducing them to write from abstract 
notions, or after the fashion of bygone ages, instead of the 
promptings of their own genius, and of the living world 
around them; as has been exemplified above all by num¬ 
berless abortions in the recent literature of that country 
where such speculations have had the greatest vogue. 
Minuter criticism on the other hand, which was the kind 
most cultivated by the ancients, and which contributed to 
the exquisite polish of their style, has few votaries in Eng¬ 
land, except Landor, whose style bears a like witness to its 
advantages. Hence, by a twofold inversion of the right 
order, that which ought to be ideal and genial, is in modern 
works often merely technical; while in the objective, technical 
parts blind caprice disports itself. 

Besides it is pleasant to find a great writer showing de¬ 
ference to one of low degree; not bristling up and stiffening, 
as men are apt to do, when any one presumes to hint the 
possibility of their not being infallible ; but listening patiently 
to objections, and ready to allow them their weight. Perhaps 
however Wordsworth may at times allow them even more 








358 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


than their due weight : and this may have been the origin 
of many of the alterations, which readers familiar with the 
earlier editions of his poems have to regret in the later. 
Thus for instance it is “ in deference to the opinion of a 
friend,” that, in the beautiful ballad on the Blind Highland 
Boy, he has substituted the turtle-shell for the tub in which 
the boy actually did float down Loch Leven. Yet, though 
the description of the household tub in the original poem 
was perhaps needlessly minute, and too broad a defiance of 
the conventional decorums of poetry, the change seems to 
introduce an incongruous feature into the story, and to 
detract from its reality and probability, giving it the air of 
a fiction. It militates against the great original principle $f 
Wordsworth’s poetry ; which was, to shew how the germs of 
poetical feeling and interest are not confined to certain pri¬ 
vileged classes and conditions of society, but are spread 
through every region of life; and that, where the feeling is 
genuine and strong, it will invest what might otherwise be 
deemed mean with a moral dignity and beauty. Were the 
incident an invention, there might be some plea for deriding 
the poet, whose imagination dwelt among such homely uten¬ 
sils : but the fact having been such as it was, the alteration is 
too much after the fashion of those with which the French. 
translators of Shakspeare have thought it became them to 
ennoble their original; too much as if one were to change 
Desdemona’s handkerchief into a shawl. A jester would 
recommend that Peter Bell s ass should in like manner be 
metamorphosed into a camel. Yet surely the vessel in which 
Diogenes lived, and Regulus died, and on which Wesley 
preacht, might be mentioned, even in this treble-refined 
age, without exciting a hysterical nausea, or setting people’s 
ears on edge. Else the poet, who has not been wont to shew 
much fear of his critics, might be content to throw it out as 
a tub for the whale. 

Even in such matters the beginning of change is as when 
one letteth out water : none knows where it will stop. The 
description of the turtle-shell, which at first was in the 
same tone with the rest of the poem, was not held to be 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


359 


sufficiently ornate. Coleridge objected to it (Biog. Lit. ii. 
136) ; very unreasonably, as it seems to me, considering that 
the ballad is professedly a fireside tale told to children, and 
that this its character was studiously preserved throughout. 
Indeed exquisite skill was shewn in the manner in which the 
story was carried into the higher regions of poetry, yet with¬ 
out ever deviating from the most childlike simplicity and 
familiarity of expression. Coleridge’s objections however led 
the author to bring in five new lines, more after the manner 
of ordinary poetical diction; but which are out of keeping 
with the rest of the poem, and would be unintelligible to its 
supposed audience. When the turtle-shell was first intro¬ 
duced, they were told that sundry curiosities had been brought 
by mariners to the coast: 

And one, the rarest, was a shell, 

Which he, poor child, had studied well; 

The shell of a green turtle, thin 
And hollow : you might sit therein ; 

It was so wide and deep. 

’Twas e’en the largest of its kind, 

Large, thin, and light as birch-tree rind ; 

So light a shell, that it would swim, 

And gaily lift its fearless rim 
Above the tossing waves. 

These lines set the shell before the children’s eyes, place them 
in it, and give life and spirit to the story. But now their 
childly brains are bewildered, by hearing that, among the 
rarities from far countries, 

The rarest was a turtle-shell; 

Which he, poor child, had studied well, 

A shell of ample size, and light 
As the pearly car of Amphitrite, 

That sportive dolphins draw. 

And , as a coracle that braves 
On Vaga’s breast the fretful waves , 

This shell upon the deep would swim, 

And gaily lift its fearless brim 
Above the tossing surge. 

Alas ! we too often find those who have to teach children, 
explaining ignotum per ignotius; and at times one is much 
puzzled to do otherwise. But is this a thing desirable in 








360 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


itself? and can it be a judicious improvement, to give up a 
clear, simple, lively description, for the sake of a few fine 
words, which leave the hearers in a mist ? u. 


In the former volume I made some remarks on the inex¬ 
pediency of substituting any other word for the first that 
comes into our head. The main reason for this is, that the 
word which comes first is likely to be the simplest, most 
natural expression of the thought. Where, from artificial 
habits of mind, this is not so, a less plain word may be made 
to give place to a plainer one with advantage. But there is 
a further consideration. The first word will often be 
connected with its neighbours by certain dim associations, 
by which, though they may never have been brought into 
distinct consciousness, it was in fact suggested in the second- 
sighted travail of writing. These associations are afterward 
lost thought of. In reading over the passage, it strikes us 
that some other word would look better in the place, would 
be more forcible, more precise, more elegant, more harmoni¬ 
ous. Now there is always something tempting in a change, 
as in every exercise of power and will : it flatters us to dis¬ 
play any kind of superiority, even over our own former selves: 
we are glad to believe that we are more intelligent than we 
were : and through the influence of these motives we readily 
assume that the change is an improvement, without consider¬ 
ing whether the new word is really better, not merely in 
itself, but also relatively to the context. They who are nice 
in the use of words, and who take pains in correcting their 
writings, must often have found afterward that many of their 
corrections were for the worse ; and I think it must have 
surprised them to observe how much further and more 
clearly they saw during the fervour of composition, than 
afterward when they were looking over what they had written, 
and examining it critically and reflectively. Hence Words¬ 
worth in his last editions has often restored the old readings, 
in passages which in some of the intervening ones he had 
been induced to alter. For instance, the beautiful little 
poem on the Nightingale and the Stockdove began originally, 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


361 


0 nightingale ! thou surely art 
A creature of a fry heart. 

This expression, as one might have expected, offended the 
prosaic mind of the Edinburgh Reviewer; and though the 
poet was not wont to hold Scotch criticism in much honour, 
he complied with it so far as to alter the second line, in the 
edition of 1815, into A creature of ebullient heart. The new 
epithet however, though not without beauty, does not intro¬ 
duce the following lines so appropriately, or bring out the 
contrast with the stockdove’s song so strongly, as its prede¬ 
cessor ; which accordingly in the recent editions has resumed 
its place. 

That an author, when revising his works some years after, 
will be much more liable to such forgetfulness of the thoughts 
and feelings which prompted the original composition, is 
plain; above all, if he be a poet, whose works must needs 
have a number of unseen threads running through them, and 
holding them together. “ In truly great poets (as Coleridge 
tells us he was taught by his schoolmaster), there is a reason, 
not only for every word, but for the position of every word.” 
Not that the poet is distinctly conscious of all these reasons : 
still less has he elaborately calculated and weighed them. 
But when he has acquired that genial mastery of language, 
which is one of the poet’s most important attributes, his 
thoughts clothe themselves spontaneously in the fittest 
words. So too, when the mind is fully possest with the idea of 
a work, it will carry out that idea in all its details, preserving 
a unity of tone and character throughout. In such a state 
it is scarcely less impossible for a true poet to say anything 
at variance with that idea, than it would be for an elm to 
bear apples, or for a rosebush to bring forth tulips. Whereas, 
when we look at the lines just cited, it seems clear that the 
author must have quite forgotten the scheme of his poem, 
and his purpose of telling it in language adapted to the 
understandings of children ; or he could hardly have com¬ 
pared his turtle-shell to “ the pearly car of Amphitrite,” and 
“the coracle on Yaga’s breast.” 

Besides a poet’s opinions both with regard to style and to 







362 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


things, his views as to the principles and forms and purposes 
of poetry and of life, will naturally undergo material changes 
in the course of years ) the more so the more genial and pro¬ 
gressive his mind is. Hence, in looking back on a work of 
former days, he will often find much that will not be in 
unison with his present notions, much that he would not say, 
at least just in the same manner, now. The truth is, the 
whole poem would be differently constructed, were he to 
write it now. And this, if it appear worth the while, is the 
best plan to adopt,—to rewrite the whole. Thus Shakspeare, 
if the first King John and Lear are youthful works of his, as 
there is strong reason for believing, rewrote them throughout 
in the maturity of his life, when, being possest with new 
ideas of the two works, he gave them a new and higher and 
mightier unity. Whereas a partial change will merely intro¬ 
duce that disharmony and jarring into the poem, which the 
author finds in his own mind. How would Comm have 
been frostbitten, had Milton set himself to correct it in his 
old age after the type of Samson Agoniste&f The inferiority 
of the Gerusalemme Conquistata to the Liberata may indeed 
be attributable in great measure to the disease that was 
preying on Tasso’s mind. But Schiller too, and even Goethe 
when correcting their youthful works, have done little but 
enfeeble them. In learning and science subsequent researches 
may expand or rectify our views : but where a work has an 
ideal, imaginative unity, that unity must not be infringed: and 
the very fact of an author’s finding a repugnance between his 
present self and the offspring of his former self, proves that 
the idea of the latter has past away from him, and that he is 
no longer in a fit state to meddle with it. Even supposing, 
what must always be questionable, that the changes in his 
own mind are all for the better, the old maxim, Denique sit 
quod vis , simplex duntaxat et unum , which even in morals is 
of such deep import, in esthetics is almost absolute. 

Of incongruities introduced into a work by a departure 
from its original idea, there is an instance in Wordsworth’s 
poem on a party of Gypsies,—a poem containing several 
majestic lines, but in which from the first the tone, as Cole- 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


363 


ridge observed, was elevated out of all proportion to the 
subject. Nor has this disproportionateness been lessened, 
but rather rendered more prominent, by the alteration it has 
undergone. The objections made in several quarters to the 
feeling exprest in this poem led the author to add four lines 
to it, protesting that he did not mean to speak in scorn of 
the gypsies ; for that “ they are what their birth And breed¬ 
ing suffers them to be,—Wild outcasts of humanity.” Now 
this may be very true ; and a new poem might have been 
written, giving utterance to this milder feeling. But it looks 
like a taint from the grandiloquence of the former lines, 
when “ all that stirs in heaven and earth ” is called to 
witness this protestation. Nor can one well see why a poem 
needing it should be retained and recognized. Above all, 
there is an abrupt sinking, when the gorgeous lines which go 
before are followed by this apology. If the gypsies are 
merely “ what their birth And breeding suffers them to be, 
Wild outcasts of humanity,” how can it be said that “ wrong 
and strife, By nature transient, are better than such torpid 
life ? ” And though the words, 'by nature transient , as applied 
to wrong and strife, express a deep and grand truth, alas! 
they are not so transient as the stationariness of the poor 
vagrants. Why again do the stars reprove such a life ? 
Surely the lordly powers of Nature have something wiser and 
juster to do, than to shame a knot of outcasts, who are “what 
their birth and breeding suffers them to be.” If they needs 
must reprove, though they hardly look as if they could, they 
might find many things on earth less congenial and more 
offensive to their heavenly peace. It might afford a whole¬ 
some warning to reformers, to observe, how, in a poem of less 
than thirty lines, the author himself by innovating has shaken 
the whole structure. 

Another poem, which seems to me to have been sadly im¬ 
paired by alteration, is one of the author’s most beautiful 
works, his Laodamia. When it was originally publisht in 
1815, the penultimate stanza, which follows the account of 
her death, ran thus : 







364 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Ah, judge her gently, who so deeply loved ! 

Her, who in reason’s spite, yet without crime, 

Was in a trance of passion thus removed ; 

Delivered from the galling yoke of time, 

And these frail elements,—to gather flowers 
Of blissful quiet mid unfading bowers. 

In the edition of 1827 this stanza was completely re¬ 
moulded, and appeared in the following shape : 

By no weak pity might the gods be moved. 

She who thus perisht, not without the crime 
Of lovers that in reason’s spite have loved, 

Was doomed to wander in a grosser clime, 

Apart from happy ghosts,—that gather flowers 
Of blissful quiet mid unfading bowers. 

Here one cannot help noticing the ingenuity with which 
the words are twisted about, to mean the very opposite of 
their original meaning. Yet even in such things it is better 
not to put new wine into old bottles. When a totally differ¬ 
ent idea is to be exprest, it is far likelier to be exprest 
appropriately in words of its own, than in a set of cast-off 
words, which had previously served to clothe some other 
form of thought. What chiefly strikes us however in the 
new stanza, is the arbitrariness with which the poet’s judge¬ 
ment has veered round; so that, after having raised Laodamia 
to the joys of Elysium, he suddenly condemns her to endless 
sorrow. In the later editions indeed, the fourth line has 
been altered into t( Was doomed to wear out her appointed 
time whereby she is elevated from the lower regions into 
Purgatory, and allowed to look for a term to her woes. Yet 
still the sentence first past on her is completely reverst. The 
change too is one contrary to the whole order of things, both 
human and divine. They who have been condemned, may 
be pardoned : but they who have already been pardoned, 
must not be condemned. This is the course even of earthly 
judicatures. Man has an instinct in the depths of his con¬ 
sciousness, which teaches him that the throne of Mercy is 
above that of Justice, that wrath is by nature transient, and 
that a sentence of condemnation may be revoked, but that 
the voice of Love is eternal, and that, when it has once gone 
forth, the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


365 


On first perceiving this change, one naturally supposes 
that some new light must have broken upon the poet, or 
rather some new darkness ; that he must at least have dis¬ 
covered some fresh marks of guilt in Laodamia, of which 
before he was not aware. But it is not so. Her words, her 
actions, her feelings are just what they were. The two or 
three slight alterations in the former part of the poem are 
merely verbal, and no way affect her character. If she was 
“ without crime” before, she must be so still: if she is “not 
without crime” now, so must she have been from the first. 
The change is solely in the author’s mind, without the 
slightest outward warrant for it: not a straw is thrown into 
the scale : his absolute nod alone makes it rise or sink. The 
only difference is, that he quotes the passage of Virgil, where 
the shade of Laodamia “is placed in a mournful region, 
among unhappy lovers.” But surely Virgil’s judgement in 
such a manner is not to overrule that of a Christian poet. 
Although the wisdom of the heathens was in certain respects 
more spiritual than that which has been current of late 
years, this is not one of the points in which we should 
appeal to their decision. The eternal law, by which the 
happiness and misery of man are bound up with his moral 
and spiritual condition, was but dimly recognized in the 
popular traditions of the ancients. The inmates of Tartarus 
were rather the vanquisht enemies of the gods; and being 
so regarded, the contemplation was not so painful to the 
moral sense : nor did it imply the same presumption in the 
judgement which cast them there. No one would now take 
Virgil as an authority for placing the whining souls of infants, 
wailing over the shortness of their lives, and those who had 
been condemned by unjust sentences, along with suicides, in 
the same mournful region. Nor would all who have perisht 
through love, whether with or without crime, be consigned 
to the same doom ; so as to make Phedra, Procris, Eriphyle, 
and Pasiphae, the companions of Evadne and Laodamia. 
The introduction of Evadne, so renowned for her heroic self- 
devotement, proves that Virgil was guided in his selection 
more by the similarity of earthly destiny, than by any moral 













366 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


rule : and every one may perceive the poetical reason for 
enumerating the martyrs, as well as the guiltier victims, of 
passionate love ; inasmuch as it is among these shades that 
Eneas is to find Dido. 

My reason however for referring to the Laodamia was, 
that it is a remarkable instance how the imaginative, ideal 
unity of a work may be violated by an alteration. It is said 
that Windham, when he came to the end of a speech, often 
found himself so perplext by his own subtilty, that he hardly 
knew which way he was going to give his vote. This is a 
good illustration of the fallaciousness of reasoning, and of 
the uncertainties which attend its practical application. 
Ever since the time of the Sophists, Logic has been too 
ready to maintain either side of a question ; and that, 
not merely in arguing with others, but even within our 
own bosoms. The workings of the Imagination however 
are far less capricious. When a poet comes to the end of 
his work, it does not rest with him to wind it up in this 
way or that. 

What! may he not do as he pleases with the creatures of 
his own fancy ? 

A true poet would almost as soon think of doing as he 
pleased with his children. He feels that the creations of his 
imagination have an existence and a reality independent of 
his will; and he therefore regards them with reverence. The 
close of their lives, he feels, must be determined by what has 
gone before. The botchers of Shakspeare indeed have 
fancied they might remodel the catastrophes of his tragedies. 
One man would keep Hamlet alive,—another, Romeo,—a 
third, Lear. Yet even these changes are less violent, and 
more easily excusable, than the entire reversal of Laodamia’s 
sentence. For in every earthly, outward event there is 
something the ground of which we cannot discern, and which 
we therefore ascribe to chance : and though in poetry the 
necessary concatenation of events ought to be more apparent, 
the unity of a character may still be preserved under every 
vicissitude of fortune. But the ultimate doom, which must 
needs be determined by the essence of the character itself, 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


367 


cannot be changed without a corresponding change in the 
character. 

Horace has warned painters against combining a man’s 
head with a horse’s neck, or making a beautiful woman ter¬ 
minate in the tail of a fish. Yet in both these cases we 
know, from the representations of centaurs and mermaids, 
the combination is not incompatible with a certain kind of 
beauty. Indeed there is something pleasing and interesting 
in the sight of the animal nature rising into the human. 
The reverse, which we sometimes see in Egyptian idols, the 
human form topt by the animal,—a man for instance with a 
horse’s head, or a woman with a fish’s,—would on the other 
hand be purely painful and monstrous ; unless where, as in 
the case of Bottom, we look on the transformation as tem¬ 
porary, and as a piece of grotesque humour. But far more 
revolting would it be to see a living head upon a skeleton, or 
a death’s head upon a living body. In moral combinations 
the contrast may not be so glaring : yet surely in them also 
is a harmony which ought not to be violated. The idea of 
the Laodamia, when we view it apart from the questionable 
stanza, is clearly enunciated in those fine lines : 

Love was given, 

Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end,— 

For this the passion to excess was driven,— 

That self might be annulled, her bondage prove 
The fetters of a dream, opposed to love. 

But as the poem ends now, it directly falsifies this assertion. 
It shows that the excess of love cannot annuli self; that,— 
so far is the bondage of self from being the fetters of a 
dream, opposed to love,—the intensest love, even when blest 
with the special favour of the gods, is powerless against the 
bondage of self. Protesilaus seems to be sent to the prayers 
of his wife for no purpose, except of proving that they who 
hear not Moses and the prophets, will not be persuaded even 
when one rises from the dead. Had the poet’s original 
intention been to consign Laodamia to Erebus, the whole 
scheme of the poem must have been different. Her weakness 
would have been brought out more prominently ; and the 












368 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


spirit of Protesilaus would hardly have been charged with 
the utterance of so many divine truths, when his sermon 
was to be as unavailing as if he had been preaching to the 
winds. The impotence of truth is not one of the aspects of 
human life which a poet may well choose as the central idea 
of a grave work. _ u* 

The reflective spirit is so dominant in the literature of the 
age, and it is so injurious to all pure beauty in composition, 
that perhaps it will not be deemed idle trifling, if I point 
out one or two more instances in which it seems to me too 
obtrusive. And I will select them from the same great 
master of modern poetry ; not only because his works stand 
criticism, and reward it better than most others, so that 
even, when tracking a fault, one is sure to light upon sundry 
beauties; but also because he is eminently the poet of his 
age, the poet in whom the best and highest tendencies of his 
contemporaries have found their fullest utterance. 

There are few lovers of poetry but will remember the 
admirable account of the sailor in the Brothers ; who 

in his heart 

Was half a shepherd in the stormy seas. 

Oft in the piping shrouds had Leonard heard 
The tones of waterfalls, and inland sounds 
Of caves and trees ; and when the regular wind 
Between the tropics filled the steady sail, 

And blew with the same breath through days and weeks, 

Lengthening invisibly its weary line 

Along the cloudless main, he, in those hours 

Of tiresome indolence, would often hang 

Over the vessel’s side, and gaze, and gaze ; 

And, while the broad green wave and sparkling foam 
Flasht round him images and hues that wrought 
In union with the employment of his heart, 

He, thus by feverish passion overcome , 

Even with the organs of his bodily eye 
Below him, in the bosom of the deep, 

Saw mountains, saw the forms of sheep that grazed 
On verdant hills, with dwellings among trees, 

And shepherds clad in the same country gray, 

Which he himself had worn. 


Beautiful as this passage is, it would be all the better, I 
think, if the first of the two lines printed in italics were 







GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


369 


omitted, and the emphasis of the second diminisht. At 
present they rather belong to a psychological analysis, than 
to a poetical representation, of feelings. It is true, the 
vision would he the effect of “ feverish passion it would be 
visible “even to the organs of the bodily eye.” So it is 
true, that a blush is caused by a sudden suffusion of blood 
to the cheek. But, though it might be physiologically 
correct to say, that, in consequence of the accelerated beating 
of the heart, there was such a determination of blood to the 
face,—the part of the body most apparent to him by whom 
the blush was occasioned,—that the veins became full, and 
the skin was tinged by it; yet no poet would write thus. 
The poet’s business is to represent the effect, not the cause ; 
the stem and leaves and blossoms, not the root ’ that which 
is visible to the imagination, not that which is discerned by 
the understanding : although by bringing out the important 
moment, which he selects for representation, and by insulating 
it from the extraneous circumstances, which in ordinary life 
surround and conceal it, he enables us to discern the causes 
more immediately, than we should do when our thoughts are 
bewildered in the maze of outward realities. 

Or look at this little poem : 

Let other bards of angels sing, 

Bright suns without a spot : 

But thou art no such perfect thing : 

Rejoice that thou art not. 

Such if thou wert in all men's vievi, 

A universal show , 

What would my fancy have to do 1 
My feelings to hestovj 1 

Heed not, though none should call thee fair : 

So, Mary, let it he ! 

If nought in loveliness compare 
With what thou art to me. 

True beauty dwells in deep retreats, 

Whose veil is unremoved, 

Till heart with heart in concord beats, 

And the lover is beloved. 

This poem again, it seems to me, would be exceedingly 
improved by the expulsion of the second stanza. The other 
three have a sweet, harmonious unity, and express a truth, 








370 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


which if any one has not felt, he is greatly to be pitied. 
But the second stanza jars quite painfully with the others. 
Even if the thought conveyed in it were accurately true, it 
would be bringing forward the internal process, which in 
poetry ought to be latent. It is only a partial truth how¬ 
ever, which, being stated by itself, as though it were the 
whole truth, becomes false. Beauty is represented, according 
to the notions of the egoistical idealists, as purely subjective, 
as a mere creation of the beholder : whereas it arises from 
the conjoint and reciprocal action of the beholder and the 
object, as is so exquisitely expressed in the last stanza. 
Beauty is indeed in the mind, in the feelings : were there 
not the idea of Beauty in the beholder, associated with the 
feeling of pleasure, nothing would be beautiful or lovely to 
him. But it is also in the object: and the union and com¬ 
munion of the two is requisite to its full perception. 
According to the second stanza, the uglier a woman was the 
more beautiful would she be : for the more would our fancy 
have to do, our feelings to bestow. And conversely, the 
more beautiful she was, the more destitute would she be of 
beauty. 

Besides there is an unpoetical exclusiveness and isolation 
in grudging that what we deem beautiful should be beau¬ 
tiful “ in all men’s view,” and in speaking scornfully of what 
is so as “ a universal show.” The poet will indeed perceive 
deeper and more spiritual beauties than other men ; and he 
will discern hidden springs and sources of Beauty, where 
others see nothing of the sort: but he will also acknowledge 
with thankfulness, that Beauty is spread abroad through 
earth and sea and sky, and dwells on the face and form, and 
in the heart of man : and he will shrink from the thought 
of its being a thing which he, or any one else, could mono¬ 
polize. He will deem that the highest and most blessed 
privilege of his genius is, that it enables him to cherish the 
widest and fullest sympathy with the hearts and thoughts of 
his brethren. u 


“ There is one class of minds (says Schelling, Philoso- 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


371 


phische Schriften, i. 388), who think about things, another, 
who strive to understand them in themselves, according to 
the essential properties of their nature.” This is one of the 
momentous distinctions between men of productive genius, 
and men of reflective talents. In the history of literature 
we find examples without number, how, on eating of the 
Tree of Knowledge, we are banisht from the Tree of Life. 
Poets, it is plain from the very meaning of the word poetry , 
if they have any claim to their title, must belong to the 
class whose aim is to think and know the things themselves. 
Nor poets only : all that is best and truly living in history, 
in philosophy, and even in science, must have its root in the 
same essential knowledge, as distinguisht from that which is 
merely circumstantial. 

Here we have the reason why Poetry has been wont to 
flourish most in the earlier ages of a nation’s intellectual 
life ; because essential knowledge is not so apt then to be 
overrun, and stunted or driven awry, by circumstantial, 
production by reflexion. In all poetry that is really such, if 
it pretend to more than an ephemeral existence, as in all 
life, there must be a mysterious basis, which is and ever 
must be incomprehensible to the reflective understanding. 
There must be something in it which can only be appre¬ 
hended by a corresponding act of the imagination, discerning 
and reproducing the incarnate idea. Now that which cannot 
be comprehended by the reflective understanding of others, 
can still less have been produced by an act of the poet’s own 
reflective understanding. Its source must lie deep within 
him, below the surface of his consciousness. The waters 
which are spread out above that surface, and which are not 
fed by an unseen fountain, are sure to dry up, and will never 
form a living, perennial stream. Indeed, if we look through 
the history of poetry, we find, in the case of all the greatest 
and most genial works, that, though their beauty may have 
manifested itself immediately to the simple instinctive 
feelings of mankind, ages have past away before the re¬ 
flective understanding has attained anything like a correct 
estimate and analysis of their merits. For they have been 

B B 2 







372 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


truly mysterious, and have indeed possest a hidden life. 
But of most modern works it may be said, that they have 
been brought down to the level of the meanest capacities. 
That which is designed to be most mysterious in them, is 
thrust the most conspicuously into view. They need no 
time, no study, to detect their beauties. Knowing from 
their own consciousness how unimaginative men are wont to 
be, the authors interline their works with a commentary on 
their merits, and act as guides through their own estates. 
It is much as if all the leaves and flowers in a garden were 
to be suddenly gifted with voices, and to begin crying out in 
clamorous consort, Come and look at me , how beautiful I am 1 
What could a lover of Nature do amid such a hubbub, but 
seek out a tuft of violets, which could not but still be silent, 
and bury his face in it, and weep 'l 

The examples hitherto cited, of the harm done to poetry 
by the intrusion of reflexion, have referred merely to lesser 
points of detail, and have been taken from the works of one 
who is indeed a poet of great imaginative power ; although 
he too, as all men must, bears the marks of his age, of its 
weakness, as well as of its strength. There have been 
writers however, in whom the shadow has almost supplanted 
the substance, who give us the ghosts of things, instead of 
the realities, and who, having been taught to observe the 
ideas impersonated in the master-pieces of former ages, think 
they too may start up and claim rank among the priests of 
the Muses, if they set about giving utterance to the same 
ideas loudly and sonorously. They forget that roots should 
lie hid, that the heart and lungs and all the vital processes 
are out of sight, and that, if they are laid bare to the light, 
death ensues : and they would fain stick their roots atop of 
their heads, and carry their hearts in their hands. Instead 
of representing persons, we are apt to describe them. Nay, 
to shorten the labour, as others cannot look into them, and 
see all the inward movements of their feelings, they are 
made to describe themselves. 

Some dramatic writers have been wont to preface their 
plays with descriptive accounts of the characters they are 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


373 


about to bring on the stage. Shadwell, for instance, did 
so : the list of the dramatis 'personae in the Squire of Alsatia 
fills three pages : and a like practice is found in Wycherly, 
Congreve, and other writers of their times. Indeed it 
accords with the nature of their works, which are chiefly 
remarkable for wit,—a quality dealing in contrasts, and 
therefore implying the distinct consciousness necessarily 
brought out thereby,—and for acuteness of observation, 
where the observer feels himself set over against the objects 
he is observing : so that they are rather the offspring of the 
reflective understanding, working consciously in selecting, 
arranging, and combining the materials supplied to it from 
without, than of any' genial, spontaneous, imaginative throes. 
Jonson too prefixt an elaborate catalogue of the same sort to 
his Every Man out of his Humour: and in him again we 
see a like predominance of reflexion, though in a mind of a 
higher and robuster order: nor are his characters the 
creations of a plastic imagination, blending the various 
elements of humanity indistinguishably into a living whole ; 
but mosaic constructions, designed to exhibit the enormities 
and extravagances of some peculiar humour. All such lists 
are merely clumsy devices for furnishing the reader with 
what he ought to deduce from the works themselves. It is 
offensively obtrusive to tell us beforehand what judgement 
we are to form on the persons we read of. It prevents our 
regarding them as living men, whom we are to study, and to 
compare with our idea of human nature. Instead of this 
we view them as fictions for an express purpose, and compare 
them therewith. We think, not what they are, but how 
they exemplify the proposition which the writer designed to 
enforce : and wherever the author’s purpose is prominent, 
art degenerates into artifice. In logic indeed the enunciation 
rightly precedes the proof. But the workings of poetry are 
more subtile and complicated and indirect: nor are our 
feelings so readily toucht by what a man intends to say or to 
do or to be, as by what he says and does and is without 
intending it. Thus we involuntarily recognise the hol¬ 
lowness of all that man does, when cut off from that spring 









374 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


of life, which, though in him, is not of him. Moreover to 
the author himself it must needs he hurtful, when he sets to 
work with a definite purpose of exhibiting such and such 
qualities, instead of living, concrete men. It leads him to 
consider, not how such a man would speak and act, but how 
on every occasion he may display his besetting humour; 
| which yet in real life he would mostly conceal, and which 
I would scarcely vent itself, except under some special excite¬ 
ment, when he was thrown off his balance, and made for¬ 
getful of self-restraint. 

Still the humours and peculiar aspects of human nature 
i thus portrayed by the second-rate poets of former times are 
those which do actually rise the most conspicuously and 
! obtrusively above the common surface of life, and which not 
seldom betray themselves by certain fixt habits of speech, 
gesture, and manner; so that there is less inappropriateness 
| in their being made thus prominent. But the psychological 
i analysis of criticism has enabled us to discern deeper and 
| more latent springs, and more delicate shades, of feeling in 
the masters of poetry : and those feelings, which are only 
genuine and powerful when latent, are now drawn forward 
into view, whereupon they splash and vanish. 

For example, no sooner had attention been called, some 
fifty years ago, to the powerful influence exercised by Fate, 

| as the dark ground of the Greek tragedies, than poet after 
I poet in Germany, from Schiller downward, set about com- 
I posing tragedies on the principle of fatality ; each insisting 
| that his own was the true Fate, and that all others were 
| spurious and fictitious. And so in fact they were : only his 
was no less so. Nor could it well be otherwise. When the 
1 Greek tragedians wrote, the overruling power of Fate was a 
living article of faith, both with them and with the people ; 
as everything ought to be, which is made the leading idea in 
a tragedy. Since a drama, by the conditions of its repre¬ 
sentation, addresses itself to the assembled people, if it is to 
| act strongly upon them, it must appeal to those feelings and 
| thoughts which actually hold sway over them. Tragic 
poetry is indeed fond of drawing its plots and personages 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 375 

from the stores of ancient history or fable ; partly because 
the immediate present is too full of petty details to coalesce 
into a grand imaginative unity, whereas antiquity even of 
itself is majestic; partly because it stirs so many personal 
feelings and interests, which sort ill with dignity and with 
solemn contemplation; and partly because a tragic cata¬ 
strophe befalling a contemporary would have too much of 
painful horrour. Yet, though the personages of tragedy 
may rightly be taken from former ages, or from forein 
countries,—remoteness in space being a sort of equivalent 
for remoteness in time,—still a true dramatic poet will 
always make the universal human element in his characters 
predominate over the accidental costume of age and country. 
Nor will he bring forward any mode of faith or super¬ 
stition as a prominent agent in his tragedy, except such as 
will meet with something responsive in the popular belief of 
his age. When Shakspeare wrote, almost everybody be¬ 
lieved in ghosts and witches. Hence it is difficult for us to 
conceive the impression which must have been made on such 
an audience by Hamlet and Macbeth: whereas the witches in 
the latter play now, on the stage, produce the effect of broad, 
fantastical caricatures; and so far are we from compre¬ 
hending the power which the demoniacal apparitions exer¬ 
cised over Macbeth’s mind, that they are seldom seen 
without peals of hoarse, dissonant laughter. In like manner 
Fate, in the modern German tragedies, instead of being 
awful, is either ludicrous or revolting. As it is not an object 
of faith, either with the poet or his hearers, so that they 
would hardly observe its latent working, he brings it forth 
into broad daylight; and his whole representation is cold, 
artificial, pompous, and untrue. While in Greek tragedy 
Fate stalks in silence among the generations of mankind, 
visiting the sins of the fathers upon the. children and grand¬ 
children,— rrjs pev & airdkoX it odes' ov yap ett ovdei Hi Ararat, 
aAX’ apa rjye kut avbpcov Kpaara (3aiv€i } —on the modern German 
stage it clatters in wooden shoes, and springs its rattle, and 
clutches its victim by the throat. u. 




376 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Your good sayings would be far better, if you did not 
think them so good. He who is in a hurry to laugh at his 
own jests, is apt to make a false start, and then has to return 
with downcast head to his place. u. 

Many nowadays write what may be called a dashing style. 
Unable to put much meaning into their words, they tiy to 
eke it out by certain marks which they attach to them, 
something like pigtails sticking out at right angles to the 
body. The finest models of this style are in the articles by 
the original editor of the Edinburgh Review, and in Lord 
Byron’s poems, above all, in the Corsair , his most popular 
work, as one might have expected that it would be, seeing 
that his faults came to a head in it. A couplet from the 
Bride of Abydos may instance my meaning. 

A thousand swords—thy Selim’s heart and hand— 

Wait—wave—defend—destroy—at thy command. 

How much grander is this, than if there had been nothing 
between the lines but commas ! even as a pigtail is grander 
than a curl, or at least has been deemed so by many a 
German prince. Tacitus himself, though his words are 
already as solid and substantial as one can wish, yet, when 
translated, is drest after the same fashion, with a skewer 
jutting out here and there. The celebrated sentence of 
Galgacus is turned into He makes a solitude—and calls it — 
peace. The noble poet places a flourish after every second 
word, like a vulgar writing-master. Or perhaps they are 
rather marks of admiration, standing prostrate, as Lord 
Castlereagh would have exprest it. Nor are upright ones 
spared. xj. 


Are you quite sure that Pygmalion is the only person who 
ever fell in love with his own handiwork ? u. 


“ In good prose (says Frederic Schlegel) every word should 
be underlined.” That is, every word should be the right 
word; and then no word would be righter than another. 
There are no italics in Plato. 






GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


377 


What! asks Holofernes ; did Plato print his books all in 
romans 1 

In mentioning Plato, I mentioned him whose style seems 
to be the summit of perfection. But if it be objected that 
the purpose of italics is to give force to style, which Plato, 
from the character of his subjects, was not solicitous about, 
I would reply, that there are no italics in Demosthenes. 
Nor are there in any of the Greek or Roman writers, though 
some of them were adepts in the art of putting as much 
meaning into words, as words are well fitted to bear. 

Among the odd combinations which Chance is ever and 
anon turning up, few are more whimsical than the notion 
that one is to gain strength by substituting italics for romans. 
In Italy one should not be surprised, if for the converse 
change a man were to incur a grave suspicion of designing to 
revive the projects of Rienzi, to be expiated by half a dozen 
years of carcere duro. Nay, the very shape of the letters 
would rather lead to the opposite conclusion, that morbidezza 
was the quality aimed at. 

Two large classes of persons in these days are fond of 
underlining their words. 

It is a favorite practice with a number of female letter- 
writers,—those, I mean, who have not yet crost over the 
river of self-consciousness into the region of quiet, unob¬ 
trusive grace, and whose intellectual pulses are always in a 
flutter, at one moment thumping, the next scarcely per¬ 
ceptible. Their consciousness of no-meaning worries them 
so, that the meaning, which, they are aware, is not in any 
words they can use, they try to put into them by scoring 
them, like a leg of pork, which their letters now and then 
much resemble. 

On the other hand some men of vigorous minds, but more 
conversant with things than with words, and who, having 
never studied composition as an art, have not learnt that the 
real force of style must be effortless, and consists mainly in 
its simplicity and appropriateness, fancy that common words 
are not half strong enough to say what they want to say; 
and so they try to strengthen them by writing them in a 






378 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


different character. Men of science do this : for words with 
them are signs, which must stand out to be conspicuous. 
Soldiers often do this : for, though a few of them are among 
the most skilful in the drilling and manouvring of words, 
the chief part have no notion that a word may be louder 
than a cannon-ball, and sharper than a sword. Cobbett 
again is profuse of italics. This instance may be supposed 
to refute the assertion, that the writers who use them are 
not verst in the art of composition. But, though Cobbett 
was a wonderful master of plain speech, all his writings 
betray his want of logical and literary culture. He had 
never sacrificed to the Graces ; who cannot be won without 
many sacrifices. He cared only for strength ; and, as his 
own bodily frame was of the Herculean, rather than the 
Apollinean cast, he thought that a man could not be very 
strong, unless he displayed his thews. Besides a Damascus 
blade would not have gasht his enemies enough for his taste : 
he liked to have a few notches on his sword. 

To a refined taste a parti-lettered page is much as if a 
musician were to strike a note every now and then in a 
wrong key, for the sake of startling attention. The proper 
use of italics seems to be, when the word italicized is not 
meant to be a mere part of the flowing medium of thought, 
but is singled out to be made a special object of notice, 
whether on account of its etymology, or of something peculiar 
in its form or meaning. As the word is employed in a 
different mode, there is a sort of reason for marking that 
difference by a difference of character. On like grounds 
words in a forein language, speeches introduced, whether in 
a narrative or a didactic work, quotations from Scripture, 
and those words in other quotations to which attention is 
especially called, as bearing immediately on the point under 
discussion, may appropriately be printed in italics. This 
rule seems to agree with the practice of the best French 
writers, as well as of our own, and is confirmed by the best 
editions of the Latin classics, in which orthography, 
punctuation, and the like minuter matters, are treated far 
more carefully than in modem works. u. 









GUESSES AT TRUTII. 


379 


What a dull, stupid lake ! It makes no noise : one can’t 
hear it flowing : it is as still as a sheet of glass. It rolls no 
mud along, and no soapsuds. It lets you see into it, and 
through it, and does nothing all day hut look at the sky, and 
show you pictures of everything round about, which are just 
as like as if they were the very things themselves. And if 
you go to drink, it shews you your own face. Hang it! I 
wish it would give us something of its own. I wish it would 
roar a little. 

Such is the substance of Bottom’s criticisms on Goethe, 
which in one or other of his shapes he has brayed out in 
many an English Review. Sometimes one might fancy he 
must have seen the vision which scared Peter Bell. 

Nor is Goethe the only writer who has to stand reproved, 
because he does not pamper the love of noise and dust. 
Nor is it in books alone that our morbid restlessness desires 
to find a response. The howling wind lashes the waves, and 
makes them roar in symphony. This is a type of the spirit 
which revels in revolutions. u. 

Why do you drug your urine ? a merchant was askt by one 
of his customers. 

Because nobody would drink it without. 

Is it not just so with Truth ? Bacon at least has declared 
that it is : and how many writers have lived in the course of 
three thousand years, who have not acted on this persuasion, 
more or less distinctly? nay, how many men who have 
not dealt in like manner even with their own hearts and 
minds ? u * 


We have learnt to exclaim against the yew-trees which 
are cut out into such fantastical shapes in Dutch gardens, 
and to recognize that a yew-tree ought to be a yew-tree, and 
not a peacock or a swan. This may seem a trivial truism ; 
and yet it is an important truth, of very wide and manifold 
application; though it does not involve that we are to let 
children run wild, and that all Education is a violation of 
Nature. But it does involve the true principle of Education, 









380 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

and may teach us that its business is to educe, or bring out, 
that which is within, not merely, or mainly, to instruct, or 
impose a form from without. Only we are not framed to be 
self-sufficient, but to derive our nourishment, intellectual 
and spiritual, as well as bodily, from without, through the 
ministration of others ; and hence Instruction must ever be 
a chief element of Education. Hence too we obtain a 
criterion to determine what sort of Instruction is right and 
beneficial,—that which ministers to Education, which tends 
to bring out, to nourish and cultivate the faculties of the 
mind, not that which merely piles a mass of information 
upon them. Moreover since Nature, if left to herself, is 
ever prone to run wild, and since there are hurtful and 
pernicious elements around us, as well as nourishing and 
salutary, pruning and sheltering, correcting and protecting 
are also among the principal offices of Education. 

But the love of artificiality is not restricted to the Dutch, 
in whom it may find much excuse from the meagre poverty 
of the forms of Nature around them, and whose country 
itself thus in a manner prepared them for becoming the 
Chinese of Europe. There are still many modes in which 
few can be brought to acknowledge that a yew-tree ought to 
be a yew r -tree : and when we think how beautiful a yew-tree 
is, left to itself, and crowned with the solemn grandeur of a 
thousand years, we need not marvel that people should be 
slower to admit this proposition as to things less majestic and 
more fleeting. Indeed I hardly know who ever lived, except 
perhaps Shakspeare, who did acknowledge it in its fulness 
and variety : and even he doubtless can only have done so 
in the mirror of his world-reflecting imagination. At all 
events very many are most reluctant to acknowledge it, and 
that too under the impulse of totally opposite feelings, not 
merely with regard to persons whom they dislike, and whom 
they paint, like Bolognese pictures, on a dark ground, 
but even with regard to their friends, whom they ought 
to love for what they are. Yet they will not let their 
friends be such as they are, or such as they were meant 
to be, but pare and twist them into imaginary shapes, 



GUESSES AT TRUTH. 38i 

as though they could not love them until they had 
made dolls of them, until they saw the impress of their 
own hands upon them. So too is it with most writers of 
fiction, and even of history. They do not give us living 
men, but either puppets, or skeletons, or, it may be, shadows : 
and these puppets may at times be giants, as though a 
Lilliputian were dandling a Brobdignagian. For bigness with 
the bulk of mankind is the nearest synonym for greatness, u. 

A celebrated preacher is in the habit of saying, that, in 
preaching, the thing of least consequence is the Sermon : 
and they who remember the singular popularity of the late 
Dean Andrewes, or who turn from the other records of 
Bishop Wilson’s life to his writings, will feel that there is 
more in this saying than its strangeness. The latter instance 
shews that the most effective of all sermons, and that which 
gives the greatest efficacy to every other, is the sermon of a 
Christian life. 

But, apart from this consideration, the saying just cited 
coincides in great measure with the declaration of Demo¬ 
sthenes, that, in speaking, Delivery is the first thing, and the 
second, and the third. For this reason oratorical excellence 
is rightly called Eloquence. 

Commonly indeed the apophthegm of Demosthenes has 
been understood in a narrower sense, as limited to Action, 
whereby it becomes a startling paradox. Even Landor has 
adopted this version of it, and makes Eschines attack 
Demosthenes on account of this absurdity, in his Conversa¬ 
tion with Phocion; while Demosthenes, in that with 
Eubulides, adduces this as a main distinction between him¬ 
self and Pericles, expressing it with characteristic majesty: 
“ I have been studious to bring the powers of Action into 
play, that great instrument in exciting the affections, which 
Pericles disdained. He and Jupiter could strike any head 
with their thunderbolts, and stand serene and immovable : 
I could not.” And again a little after : “ Pericles, you have 
heard, used none, but kept his arm wrapt up within his vest. 
Pericles was in the enjoyment of that power, which his 




3g2 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

virtues and his abilities well deserved. If he had carried in 
his bosom the fire that bums in mine, he would have kept 

his hand outside.” . . 

Still this interpretation seems to have no better origin 
than the passages in which Cicero, when alluding to the 
anecdote of Demosthenes (De Orat. iii. 56. De Clar. Orat. 38. 
Orat. 17), uses the word Actio. Many errours have arisen 
from the confounding of special significations of words, which 
are akin, both etymologically and in their primary meaning, 
like Actio and Action. But I believe, the Latin Actio , in its 
rhetorical application, was never restricted within our narrow 
bounds : indeed we ourselves reject this restriction in the 
dramatic use of acting and actor. The vivid senses of the 
Romans felt that the more spiritual members of the body 
can act, as well as the grosser and more massive ; and they 
who have lived in southern climes know that this attribute of 
savage life has not been extinguisht there by civilization. 
Indeed the context in the three passages of Cicero ought to 
have prevented the blunder : his principal agents are the 
voice and the eyes : “ animi est enim omnis actio, et imago 
animi vultus, indices oculi : ” and he defines Actio to be 
“corporis quaedam eloquentia, cum constet e voce atque 
motu.” Even after the mistake had been made, it ought to 
have been corrected, by the observation that Quintilian 
(xi. 3) has substituted Pronunciatio for Actio. But the whole 
story is plain, and the exaggeration accounted for, when we 
read it in the Lives of the Ten Orators ascribed to Plutarch. 
Every one has heard of the bodily disadvantages which 
Demosthenes had to contend with. No man has more 
triumphantly demonstrated the dominion of the mind over 
the body ; for few speakers have had graver natural disquali¬ 
fications for oratory, than he whose name in the history of 
oratory stands beyond competition the foremost. Having 
been cought down, as we term it, one day, he was walking 
home despondently. But Eunomus the Thriasian, who was 
already an old man, met him and encouraged him : so too 
did the actor Andronicus still more, telling him that his 
speeches were well, but that he failed in action and delivery 



GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


383 


(Aewrot 8e ra rrjs vnoKpio-eas). He then reminded him of what 
he had spoken in the assembly; whereupon Demosthenes, 
believing him, gave himself up to the instruction of 
Andronicus. Hence, when some one askt him what is the 
first thing in oratory, he said imonpiais, Manner, or Delivery ; 
what the second % Delivery; what the third 1 Delivery . In 
this story there may perhaps be some slight inaccuracies; 
but in substance it agrees with Plutarch’s account in his 
Life of Demosthenes, § viii. 

We may deem it an essential character of Genius, to be 
unconscious of its own excellence. If a man of genius is a 
vain man, he will be vain of what is not his genius. But we 
are very apt to overrate a talent,‘which has been laboriously 
trained and cultivated. Thus Petrarch lookt to his Africa 
for immortality, and Shakspeare to his Sonnets, more, it 
would seem, than to his Plays. Thus too Bacon “con¬ 
ceived that the Latine volume of his Essayes, being in the 
universal language, might last as long as bookes lastj 
though other considerations are also to be taken into account 
here. No wonder then that Demosthenes somewhat over¬ 
valued an attainment, which had cost him so much trouble, 
and in which the speech of Eschines ,—What would you have 
said, if you had heard the beast himself1 —proves that he had 
achieved so much in overcoming the disabilities of his 
nature; so much indeed, that Dionysius (nepl rrjs Ae/crt^? 
Arjpocrdevovi deivoTrjTos, § xxii) says, that he was acknowledged 
by all to be the most consummate master of inoKpicns. His 
own experience had taught him how the effect of a speech 
depended almost entirely upon its delivery, by the defects of 
which his earlier orations had been marred \ as Bacon, in his 
Essay on Boldness, after giving the erroneous version of our 
anecdote, remarks : u He said it, that knew it best, and had 
by nature himself no advantage in that he commended. 
The objections which are subjoined to this remark, are 
founded mainly on the misunderstanding of what Demo¬ 
sthenes had said. 

Still, though there is a considerable analogy between the 
importance of manner or delivery in speaking and in 











384 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


preaching, it should be borne in mind that nothing is more 
injurious to the effect of the latter, than whatever is artificial, 
studied, theatrical. Besides, while, as a friend observes, 
viroKpicris has often been a main ingredient in oratory under 
more senses than one, when it enters into preaching under 
the sense denounced in the New Testament, it is the poison, 
a drop of which shivers the glass to atoms. In fact the 
reason why delivery is of such force, is that, unless a man 
appears by his outward look and gesture to be himself 
animated by the truths he is uttering, he will not animate 
his hearers. It is the live coal that kindles others, not the 
dead. Nay, the same principle applies to all oratory; and 
what made Demosthenes the greatest of orators, was that he 
appeared the most entirely possest by the feelings he wisht 
to inspire. The main use of his viroKpiais was, that it enabled 
him to remove the natural hindrances which checkt and 
clogged the stream of those feelings, and to pour them 
forth with a free and mighty torrent that swept his 
audience along. The effect produced by Charles Fox, who 
by the exaggerations of party-spirit was often compared to 
Demosthenes, seems to have arisen wholly from this earnest¬ 
ness, which made up for the want of almost every grace, both 
of manner and style. u. 

Most people, I should think, must have been visited at 
times by those moods of waywardness, in which a feeling 
adopts the language usually significant of its opposite. 
Oppressive joy finds vent in tears ; frantic grief laughs. So 
inadequate are the outward exponents of our feelings, that, 
when a feeling swells beyond its wont, it bursts through its 
ordinary face, and lays bare the reverse of it. Something 
of the sort may be discerned in the exclamation of Eschines 
iust quoted. No laudatory term could have exprest his 
admiration so forcibly as the single word OrjpLov. u. 

The proposition asserted a couple of pages back, that 
genius is unconscious of its own excellence, has been con¬ 
tested by my dear friend, Sterling, in his Essay on Carlyle. 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


385 


In his argument on this point there is some truth, which 
required perhaps to be stated, for the sake of limiting the 
too exclusive enforcement of the opposite truth: but there 
is no sufficient recognition of that opposite truth, which is of 
far greater moment in the present stage of the human mind, 
and which Mr. Carlyle had been proclaiming with much 
power, though not without his favorite exaggerations. I 
will not take upon me to arbitrate between the combatants, 
by trying to shew how far each is in the right, and where 
each runs into excess : but, as Sterling adduces some 
passages from Shakspeare’s Sonnets, in proof that he was not 
so unconscious of his own greatness, as he has commonly 
been deemed, I will rejoin, that the distinction pointed out 
above seems to remove this objection. If Shakspeare speaks 
somewhat boastfully of his Sonnets, we are to remember 
that they were not, like his Plays, the spontaneous utterances 
and creations of his Genius, but artificial compositions, 
artificial even in their structure, and alien in their origin, 
hardly yet naturalized. Besides there is a sort of con¬ 
ventional phraseology, handed down from the age of Horace, 
and which he had inherited from that of Pindar, whereby 
poets magnify their art, declaring that, while all other 
memorials of greatness perish, those committed to immortal 
verse will endure. In speaking thus the poet is magnifying 
his art, rather than himself. But of the wonderful excel¬ 
lence of his Plays, we have no reason for believing that 
Shakspeare was at all aware; though Sterling does not go 
beyond the mark, when he says, that, “if in the wreck of 
Britain, and all she has produced, one creation of her spirit 
could be saved by an interposing Genius, to be the endow¬ 
ment of a new world,” it would be the volume that contains 
them. Yet Shakspeare himself did not take the trouble of 
publishing that volume ; and even the single Plays printed 
during his life seem to have been intended for playgoers, 
rather than to gain fame for their author. 

I grant that, in this world of ours, in which the actual is 
ever diverging from or falling short of its idea, the uncon¬ 
sciousness, which belongs to Genius in its purity, cannot be 







386 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


preserved undefiled, any more than that which belongs to 
Goodness in its purity. Miserable experience must have 
taught us that it is impossible not to let the left hand know 
what the right hand is doing; and yet this is the aim set 
before us, not merely the lower excellence of not letting 
others know, but the Divine Perfection of not knowing it 
ourselves. The same thing holds with regard to Genius. 
There are numbers of alarums on all sides to arouse our self- 
consciousness, should it ever flag or lag, from our cradle 
upward. Whithersoever we go, we have bells on our toes to 
regale our carnal hearts with their music; and bellmen meet 
us in every street to sound their chimes in our ears. Others 
tell us how clever we are ; and we repeat the sweet strains 
with ceaseless iteration, magnifying them at every repetition. 
Hence it is next to a marvel if Genius can ever preserve any 
of that unconsciousness which belongs to its essence; and 
this is why, when all talents are multiplying, Genius becomes 
rarer and rarer with the increase of civilization, as is also the 
fate of its moral analogon, Heroism. Narcissus-like it wastes 
away in gazing on its own loved image. 

Yet still Nature is mighty, in spite of all that man does 
to weaken and pervert her. Samsons are still born; and 
though to the fulness and glory of their strength it is re¬ 
quisite that the razor should not trim their exuberant locks 
into forms which they may regard with complacency in the 
flattering mirror of self-consciousness, the hair, after it has 
been cut off, may still grow again, and they may recover 
some of their pristine vigour. But in such cases, as has been 
instanced in so many of the most genial minds during the 
last hundred years, the energies, which had been cropt and 
checkt by the perversities of the social system, are apter, 
when they burst out afresh, for the work of destruction, than 
of production, even at the cost of perishing among the ruins, 
which they drag down on the objects of their hatred. 

Of the poets of recent times, the one who has achieved the 
greatest victory over the obstructions presented to the pure 
exercise of the Imagination by the reflective spirit and the 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


387 


little question, is Goethe : and the following remarks in one 
of Schiller’s earliest letters to him may help us to understand 
how that victory was gained, confirming and illustrating 
much of what has just been said. “ Your attentive observa¬ 
tion, which rests upon objects with such calmness and sim¬ 
plicity, preserves you from the risk of wandering into those 
by-paths, into which both Speculation and the Imagination, 
when following its own arbitrary impulses, are so apt to stray. 
Your unerring intuitions embrace everything in far more 
completeness, which Analysis laboriously hunts out; and 
solely because it lies thus as a whole in you, are you unaware 
of your own riches : for unhappily we only know what we 
separate. Minds of your class therefore seldom know how 
far they have penetrated, and how little reason they have to 
borrow from Philosophy, which has only to learn from them. 
Philosophy can merely resolve what is given to her : giving 
is not the act of Analysis, but of Genius, which carries on its 
combinations according to objective laws, under the dim but 
sure guidance of the pure Reason.—You seek for what is 
essential in Nature; but you seek it by the most difficult 
path, from which a weaker intellect would shrink. You take 
the whole of Nature together, in order to gain light on its 
particular members : in the totality of its phenomena you 
search after the explanation of individual objects. From the 
simplest forms of organization, you mount step by step to the 
more complex, so as at length to construct the most complex 
of all, man, genetically out of the materials of the whole 
edifice of Nature. By reproducing him, so to say, in con¬ 
formity to the processes of Nature, you try to pierce into his 
hidden structure. A great and truly heroic idea ! which 
sufficiently shews how your mind combines the rich aggregate 
of your conceptions into a beautiful unity. You can never 
have hoped that your life would be adequate for such a 
purpose ; but the mere entering on such a course is of 
higher value than the completion of any other; and you 
have chosen like Achilles between Phthia and immortality. 
Had you been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and 
been surrounded from your cradle by exquisite forms of 


c 0 2 








388 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Nature and ideal forms of Art, your journey would have 
been greatly shortened, or perhaps rendered wholly need¬ 
less. The very first aspect of things would have pre¬ 
sented them in their necessary forms ; and your earliest 
experience would have led you to the grand style in art. 
But, as you were born a German, as your Greek mind was 
cast into our Northern world, you had no other choice, 
except either to become a Northern artist, or by the help of 
reflexion to gain for your imagination, what the realities 
around you denied to it, and thus by a sort of inward act 
and intellectual process to bring forth your works as though 
you were in Greece. At that period of life, at which the soul 
fashions its inner world from the outer, being surrounded by 
defective forms, you had received the impressions of our wild, 
Northern Nature, when your victorious Genius, being superior 
to its materials, became inwardly conscious of this want, and 
was outwardly confirmed in its consciousness through your 
acquaintance with the Nature of Greece. Hereupon you 
were forced to correct the old impressions previously graven 
on your imagination by a meaner Nature, according to the 
higher model which your formative spirit created; and such 
a work cannot be carried on, except under the guidance of 
ideal conceptions. But this logical direction, which the 
spirit of reflexion is compelled to take, does not agree well 
with the esthetical processes through which alone the mind 
can produce. Thus you had an additional labour; for, as 
you had past over from immediate contemplations to abstrac- 
tions, you had now to transform your conceptions back again 
into intuitions, and your thoughts into feelings; because it 
is only by means of these that Genius can bring forth. This 
is the notion I have formed of the course of your mind ; and 
you will know best whether I am right. But what you can 
hardly know,—because Genius is always the greatest mystery 
to itself,—is the happy coincidence of your philosophical 
instinct with the purest results of speculative Reason. At 
first sight indeed it would seem as though there could be no 
stronger opposition than between the speculative spirit, 
which starts from unity, and the intuitive, which starts from 






GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


389 


multiplicity. But if the former seeks after Experience with 
a chaste and faithful purpose, and if the latter seeks after 
Law with a free, energetic exercise of thought, they cannot 
fail of meeting halfway. It is true that the intuitive mind 
deals only with individuals, and the speculative with classes. 
But if an intuitive spirit is genial, and seeks for the impress 
of necessity in the objects of experience, though it will always 
produce individuals, they will bear the character of a class : 
and if the speculative spirit is genial, and does not lose sight 
of experience, while rising above experience, though it will 
only produce classes, they will be capable of life, and have a 
direct relation to realities.” 

There are some questionable positions in this passage, 
above all, the exaggerated depreciation of the northern spirit, 
and exaltation of the classical, from which misjudgement 
Goethe in his youth was one of our first deliverers, though 
in after years he perhaps gave it too much encouragement, 
and which exercised a noxious influence upon Schiller, as we 
see in his Bride of Messina, and in the frantic Paganism of 
his ode on the Gods of Greece. But the discussion of these 
questions would require a survey of the great age of German 
literature. My reasons for quoting the passage are, that it 
asserts what seems to me the truth with regard to the 
unconsciousness of Genius, and that it sets forth the difficulty 
of preserving that unconsciousness in an age of intellectual 
cultivation, shewing at the same time how it has been over¬ 
come by him who of all men has done the most in the way of 
overcoming it. A mighty Genius will transform its concep¬ 
tions back into intuitions, even as the technical rules of 
music or painting are assimilated by a musician or a painter, 
and as we speak and write according to the rules of grammar, 
without ever thinking about them. But it requires a potent 
Genius to carry this assimilative power into the higher 
regions of thought. u * 

When a poetical spirit first awakens in a people, and seeks 
utterance in song, its utterances are almost entirely objective. 
The child’s mind is well nigh absorbed for a time in the 












390 


GUESSES AT TKUTH. 


objects of its perceptions, and is scarcely conscious of its own 
existence as independent and apart from them ; and in like 
manner the poet, in the childhood of a nation,—which is of 
far longer duration than that of an individual, because the 
latter is surrounded by persons in a more advanced state, 
who lift and draw him up to their level, whereas a people has 
to mount step by step, without aid, and in spite of the vis 
inertiae of the mass,—the poet, I say, in this stage, seems to 
lose himself in the objects of his song, and hardly to con¬ 
template himself in his distinctness and separation. Nor 
does he make those distinctions among these objects, which 
the refinements of more cultivated ages establish, often not 
without arbitrary fastidiousness. All things are interesting 
to him, if they shew forth life and power : the more they 
have of life and power, the more interesting they become : 
but even the least things are so, as they are also to a child, 
by a kind of natural sympathy, not by an act of the will 
fixing itself reflectively upon them, according to the process 
so frequently exemplified in Wordsworth. Thus we see 
next to nothing of the poet in the Homeric poems, in the 
| Niebelungen, in the ballads of early ages. To represent 
what is and has been, suffices for delight. Nothing further is 
needed. Poetry is rather a natural growth of the mind, 
than a work of art. The umbilical chord, which connects it 
with its mother, has not yet been severed. 

In youth the objects of childish perceptions become the 
objects of feelings, of desires, of passions. Self puts forth its 
horns. Consciousness wakes up out of its dreamy slumber; 
but the objects of that consciousness, which stir and excite 
it, are outward. Hence it finds vent in lyrical poetry; but 
this lyrical poetry will be objective, in that it will be the vivid 
utterance of actual feelings, not a counterfeit, nor a meditative 
analysis of them. 

Moreover in both these forms poetry will be essentially 
and thoroughly national. Indeed all true poetiy must be so, 
and all poetry in early ages will be so of necessity. For in 
the early ages of a people all its members have a sort of 
generic character: the individualizing features come out 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


391 


later, with the progress of cultivation ; and still later is the 
introduction of forein elements; which at once multiply 
varieties, and impair distinct individuality. But a poet is 
the child of his people, the firstborn of his age, the highest 
representative of the national mind, which in him finds an 
utterance for its inmost secrets. The vivid sympathies with 
nature and with man, which constitute him a poet, must 
needs be excited the most powerfully, from his childhood 
upward, by those forms of outward nature and of human, 
with which he has been the most conversant; and when he 
speaks, he will desire to speak so as to find an answer in the 
hearts of his hearers. In the ballad or epic he merely 
exhibits the objects of their own faith to them, of their own 
love and fear and hatred and desire, their own views of man 
and of the powers above him, their favorite legends, the very 
sights and sounds, the forms and colours, the incidents and 
adventures, they are most familiar with and most delight in. 
As the German poet has said, 

Think you that all would have listened to Homer, that all would have 
read him, 

Had he not smoothed his way to the heart by persuading his reader, 

That he is just what he wishes ? and do we not high in the palace, 

And in the chieftain’s tent see the soldier exult in the Iliad ? 

While in the street and the market, where citizens gather together, 

All far gladlier hear of the craft of the vagrant Ulysses. 

There the warrior beholdeth himself in his helmet and armour 
Here in Ulysses the beggar perceives how his rags are ennobled. 

In like manner the lyrical poetry of early ages is the 
national expression of feeling and of passion, of love and of 
devotion,—national both in its modes and in its objects. 

This however is little more than the blossoms which are 
scattered, more or less abundantly, over a fruit-tree in spring, 
and which gleam with starry brightness amid the dark net¬ 
work of the leafless branches. As the season advances, 
Nature no longer contents herself with these fleeting mani¬ 
festations of her exuberant playfulness : the down on the 
boyish cheek gives place to the rougher manly beard, the 
smile of merriment to the sedate, stern aspect of thought: 
she strips herself of the bloom with which she had been 








392 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


toying, arrays her form in motherly green ; and, though she 
cannot repress the pleasure of still putting forth flowers here 
and there, her main task is now, not to dally with the air 
and sunshine, but to convert them into nourishing fruit, and 
living, generative seed. Feeling, passion, desire, kindling 
often into fervid intensity, are the predominant characters of 
youth. In manhood, when it is really attained to, these are 
controlled and subjugated by the will. The business of 
manhood is to act. Thus the manhood of poetry is the 
drama. The continuous flow of outward events, the simple 
effusion of feelings venting themselves in song, will not suffice 
to fill the mind of a people, when it has found out that its 
proper calling and work is to act, to shape the world after its 
own forms and wishes, to rule over it, and to battle inces¬ 
santly with all manner of enemies, especially those which the 
will raises against itself, by struggling against the moral laws 
of the universe. 

Now the whole form, and all the conditions of dramatic 
poetry, according to its original conception,—which is an 
essential part of its idea,—imply that it is to be addrest, 
more directly than any other kind of poetry, to large bodies 
of hearers, who assemble out of all classes, and may therefore 
be regarded as representatives of the whole nation, and that 
it is to stir them by acting immediately on their under¬ 
standing and their feelings. Hence the adaptation to them, 
which is requisite in all poetry, is above all indispensable to 
the drama; and it belongs to the essence of dramatic poetry 
to be national. So too it has been, in the countries in which 
it has greatly flourisht, in Greece, in Spain, in England. In 
France also comedy has been so, the only kind which has 
prospered there. For as to French tragedy, it is a hybrid 
exotic, aiming mainly at a classical form, yet omitting the 
very feature which had led to the adoption of that form, the 
chorus, and substituting a conventional artificiality of sen¬ 
timents and manners for the ideal simplicity of the Greeks. 
It was designed for the court, not for the people. 

In these latter times a new body has sprung up, to whom 
writers address themselves, that which Coleridge jeers at 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


393 


under the title of the Reading Public. Now for many modes 
of authorship, for philosophy, for science, for philology and 
all other ologies, indeed for prose generally, with the exception 
of the various branches of oratory, it has ever been a neces¬ 
sary condition that they should be designed for readers. 
With regard to these the danger is, that, in proportion as 
the studious readers are swallowed up and vanish in the mass 
of the unstudious, that which, from its speculative or learned 
character, ought to require thought and knowledge, may be 
debased by being popularized. The true philosopher’s aim 
must ever be, Fit audience let me find , though few. But, 
through the general diffusion of reading, a multitude of 
people have become more or less conversant with books, and 
have attained to some sort of acquaintance with literature. 
This is the public for which our modern poets compose. 
They no longer sing; they are no longer d oidol bards: they 
are mere writers of verses. Instead of sounding a trumpet 
in the ears of a nation, they play on the flute before a select 
auditory. 

This is injurious to poetry in many ways. It has become 
more artificial. It no longer aims at the same broad, grand, 
overpowering effects. It is grown elegant, ingenious, refined, 
delicate, sentimental, didactic. Instead of epic poems, in 
which the heart and mind of a people roll out their waves 
of thought and feeling, to receive them back into their own 
bosom, we have poems constructed according to rules, which 
are not inherent laws, but maxims deduced by empirical 
abstraction; and we even get at length to compositions, like 
some of Southey’s, in which materials are scraped together 
from the four quarters of the world, and the main part of 
the poetry may often lie in the notes,—not those of the harp 
awakening the bard to a sympathetic flow of emotion, but of 
the artificer exhibiting the processes of his own craft. A 
somewhat similar change comes over lyric poetry. It takes to 
expressing sentiment, rather than feeling; though here may be 
a grand compensation, as we see eminently in Wordsworth. 

But to no kind of poetry is this revolution of the national 
mind, this migration out of the period of unconscious pro- 







394 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

duction into that of reflective composition, more hurtful than 
to the Drama. Hence, when a nation has had a great 
dramatic age, as it has been an age of intense national life, 
like that which followed the Persian wars in Greece, and the 
reign of our Elizabeth, so has it been anterior to the age 
when reflexion became predominant, and has been cut short 
thereby. Hence too in Germany, as the effect of the religious 
Schism, in which the new spirit did not gain the same poli¬ 
tical ascendency as in England, and that of the Thirty Years 
war,—unlike that of forein wars, which unite and concentrate 
the energies of a people,—was to denationalize the nation, 
the period, which would else have been fit for the drama, 
past away almost barrenly; and when poets of high genius 
began to employ themselves upon it, in the latter half of the 
last century, the true dramatic age was gone by, so that their 
works mostly bear the character of postumous, or postobits. 
In Goethe’s dramas indeed, as in all his works, we find the 
thoughts and speculations and doubts and questionings, the 
feelings and passions, the desires and aspirations and anti¬ 
pathies, the restless cravings, the boastful weaknesses, the 
self-pampering diseases of his own age, that is, of an age in 
which the elementary constituents of human nature have 
been filtered through one layer of books after another : but 
for this very reason his dramas are wanting in much that is 
essential to a drama,—in action, the proper province of 
which is the outward world of Nature and man,—and in 
theatrical power, being mostly better fitted for meditative 
reading than for scenic representation. 

The special difficulty which besets the poets of these later 
days, arises from this, that they cannot follow the simple 
impulses of their genius, but are under the necessity of 
comparing these every moment with the results of reflexion 
and analysis. It is not merely that the great poets of earlier 
times preoccupy the chief objects and topics of poetical in¬ 
terest, and thus, as has been argued, drive their successors 
into the byways and the outskirts of the poetical world, and 
compell those who would excell or emulate them, to betake 
themselves to intellectual antics and extravagances. What- 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 395 

ever of truth may lie in this remark, is merely superficial. 
Every age has its own peculiar forms of moral and intel¬ 
lectual life ; and Goethe has fully proved that an abundant 
store of materials for the creative powers of the Imagination 
were to be found, by those who had eyes to discern them, in 
what might have been deemed an utterly prosaic age. The 
difficulty to which I am referring, is that which he himself 
has so happily exprest, when, in speaking of some com¬ 
parisons that had been instituted between himself and 
Shakspeare, he said : ShaTcspeare always hits the right nail on 
the head at once; but I have to stop and think which is the 
right nail , before I hit. 

It is true, that from the very first certain rules and 
maxims of art, pertaining to its outward forms, became 
gradually establish!;, with which the poet is in a manner 
bound to comply, even as he is with the rules of metre. 
But such rules, as I have already said, are readily assimilated 
and incorporated by the Imagination, which recognizes its 
own types and processes in them, and grows in time to con¬ 
form to them without thinking of them. This however is 
far more difficult, when analysis and reflexion have dug down 
to the deeper principles of poetry, and it yet behoves us to 
shape our works according to those principles, without any 
conscious reference, conforming to them as it were instinc¬ 
tively. That this can be done, we see in Goethe; and the 
observations of Schiller quoted above are an attempt to 
explain the process. An instance too of the manner in 
which the Imagination works according to secret laws, 
without being distinctly conscious of them, is afforded by 
Goethe’s answer, when Schiller objected to the conclusion of 
his beautiful Idyl, Alexis and Dora. After giving one reason 
for it founded on the workings of nature, and another on the 
principles of art, which reasons, it is plain, he had been 
quite unconscious of, though he had acted under their in¬ 
fluence, until he was called upon for an explanation, he 
adds : “ Thus much in justification of the inexplicable 
instinct by which such things are produced.” 

For an example of the opposite errour, I might refer to 



396 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

what was said some twenty pages back about the manner in 
which Fate has been introduced in a number of recent 
German tragedies, much as though, instead of the invisible 
laws of attraction, we were called to gaze on a planetary 
system kept in motion by myriads of ropes and pullies. A 
like illustration might be drawn from the prominency often 
given to the diversities of national character; with regard to 
which point reflexion of late years has attained to correcter 
views, and, in so doing, as is for ever the case, has justified 
tke perceptions of early ages. Among the results from the 
decay of the Imagination, and the exclusive predominance of 
the practical Understanding, one was the losing sight of the 
peculiarities of individual and of national character. The 
abstract generalization, man, compounded according to pre¬ 
scription of such and such virtues, or of such and such vices, 
was substituted for the living person, whose features receive 
their tone and expression from the central principle of his 
individuality. Hence our serious poetry hardly produced a 
character from the time of Milton to that of Walter Scott. 
On the other hand, among the ideas after which the foremost 
minds of the last hundred years have been striving, is that 
of individuality, and, as coordinate therewith, of nationality, 
not indeed in its older forms, as cut off* from the grand 
unity of mankind, but as a living component part of it. 
That this idea, though it had not been philosophically enun¬ 
ciated, preexisted in the poetical Imagination, we see in 
Shakspeare, especially in his Roman plays. In Shakspeare 
however this nationality is represented rightly, as deter¬ 
mining and moulding the character, but not as talking of 
itself, not as being aware that it is anything else than an 
essential part of the order of Nature. Coriolanus is a 
Roman ; but he is not for ever telling us so. Rome is in his 
heart: if you were to anatomize him, you would find it 
mixt with his lifeblood, and pervading every vein : but it 
does not flit about the tip of his tongue. Indeed so far is 
the declaration of what one is from being necessary to the 
reality of one’s being, that it is more like the sting of those 
insects which die on the wound they inflict. 



GUESSES AT TRUTH. M7 

To turn to an instance of an opposite kind : Muellner, a 
German playwright, who gained great celebrity in his own 
country about thirty years ago, and some of whose works 
were lauded in England,—who moreover really had certain 
talents for the stage, especially that of producing theatrical 
effect, having himself been in the habit of acting at private 
theatres, thereby making up in a measure for the want of 
the advantage possest by the Greek dramatists and by 
Shakspeare, of studying their art practically, as well as 
theoretically,—tried in like manner to make up for his want 
of creative Imagination, by dressing his tragedies according 
to the newest, most fashionable receits of dramatic cookery. 
His art was ostentare artem , through fear lest we might not 
discover it without. There is no under-current in his 
writings, no secret working of passion : every vein and nerve 
and muscle is laid bare, as in an anatomy, and accompanied 
with a comment on its peculiar excellences. His personages 
are never content with being what they are, and acting 
accordingly : they are continually telling you what they are ; 
and their morbid selfconsciousness preys upon them so, that 
they can hardly talk or think of anything, except their own 
prodigious selves. 

Thus in his tragedy, called Guilt, which turns in great 
part upon the contrast between the Norwegian character 
and the Spanish, a Norwegian maiden comes in, saying, I 
am a Norwegian maiden; and Norwegian maidens are very 
wonderful creatures. A Spanish woman exclaims, I am a 
Spanish woman; and Spanish women are very wonderful 
creatures. Even a boy is stript of his blessed privilege of 
unconscious innocence, and tells us how unconscious and 
innocent he is. To crown the -whole, the hero enters, and 
says : I am the most wonderful being of all: for I am a Nor¬ 
wegian ; and Norwegians are wonderful beings: and I am also 
a Spaniard; and Spaniards also are wonderful beings. The 
North and the South have committed adultery within me. Out 
on them ! there's death in their kiss. I am a riddle to myself. 
Pole and Pole unite in me. I combine fire and water, earth 
and heaven, God and the devil. The last sentences are trans- 




398 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


lated literally from the original. They were meant to be 
very grand, and probably excited shouts of applause : yet 
they are a piece of turgid falsetto. 

In a certain sense indeed there is a truth in these lines, so 
far as they set forth the inherent discords of our nature, a 
truth to which all history bears witness, and which comes out 
more forcibly at times and in characters of demoniacal 
power. But it is as contrary to nature for a man to anato¬ 
mize his heart and soul thus, as it would be to make him 
dissect his own body. The blunder lies in representing a 
person as speaking of himself in the same way in which a 
dispassionate observer might speak of him. It is much as 
if one were to versify the analytical and rhetorical accounts, 
which critics have given of Shakspeare’s characters, and 
then to put them into the mouths of Macbeth, Othello, 
Lear, nay, of Juliet, Imogen, Ophelia, and even of the child, 
Arthur. 

Yet in Hamlet himself, that personification of human 
nature brooding over its own weaknesses and corruptions, 
that only philosopher, with one exception, whom Poetry has 
been able to create, how different are all the reflexions! 
which moreover come forward mainly in his soliloquies; 
whereas Muellner’s hero raves out his self-analysis in the 
ears of another, a woman, his own sister, the very sight of 
whom should have made him fold up the poisoned leaves of 
his heart. The individual, personal application of Hamlet’s 
reflexions is either swallowed up in the general confession of 
the frailty of human nature; or else they are the self- 
reproaches and self-stimulants of irresolute weakness, the 
foam which the sea leaves behind on the sands, when it sinks 
back into its own abysmal depths, and the dissonant mutter¬ 
ing of the waves, that have been vainly lashing an immovable 
rock. So that they arise naturally, and almost necessarily, 
out of his situation, out of the conflict with the pressure of 
events, which he shrinks from encountering, and thus are 
altogether different from the practice of modern writers, who 
make a man stand up in cold blood, and recite a dissertation 
upon himself, earned on, with the interposition of divers 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


399 


similar dissertations recited by others, through the course of 
five acts. 

To make the difference more conspicuous, it would be 
instructive to see a soliloquy for Hamlet written by one of 
these modern playwrights. How thickly would it be deckt 
out with all manner of floscules! for the same reason for 
which a tragedy-queen wears many more diamonds than a 
real one. The following might serve as a sample. 

I am a prince. A prince a sceptre bears. 

Sceptres are golden. Gold is flexible. 

Therefore am I as flexible as gold. 

’Tis strange ! ’Tis passing strange ! I’m a strange being ! 

None e’er was stranger. I was born in Denmark ; 

In Wittenberg I studied. Wittenberg ! 

Why Wittenberg is set amid the sands 
Of Northern Germany. So stood Palmyra 
Amid the sands of Syria. Sand ! Sand ! Sand ! 

I wonder how ’twas possible for Sand 

To murder Kotzebue. Sand flies round and round 

And every puff of wind will change its form. 

Thus every puff of wind will change my mind. 

Ay, that vile sand I breathed at Wittenberg 
Has rusht into my soul ; and there it whirls 
And whirls about, just like the foam that flies 
From water-wheels. It almost chokes me up. 

So did it Babylon. That baby loon ! 

To build his city in the midst of sands ! 

But that was in the babyhood of man. 

Now we are older grown, and wiser too. 

I live in Copenhagen by the sea. 

That is the home of every Dane. The sea ! 

But that too waves and wavers. So do I. 

I am the sea. But I am golden too, 

And sandy too. 0 what a marvel’s this ! 

I am a golden, sandy sea. Prodigious ! 

Ay, ay ! There are more things in heaven and earth, 

Than are dreamt of in our Philosophy. 

Nor are these aberrations and extravagances, these pre¬ 
posterous inversions of the processes of the Imagination, 
trying to educe the concrete out of a medley of abstractions, 
confined to Germany. They may be commoner there, 
because the German mind has been busier in philosophical 
and esthetical speculations : and when they are found in our 
own poetry, there may be more of genuine poetical substance 
to sustain them. But I have cited some passages in which 


















400 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


the reflective spirit has operated injuriously on Wordsworth ; 
and, if we look into Lord Byron’s works, we shall not have to 
go far before we light on examples of similar errours. For 
he is eminently the prince of egotists; and, instead of repre¬ 
senting characters, he describes them, by versifying his own 
reflexions and meditations about them. It has been asserted 
indeed by a celebrated critic, “ that Lord Byron’s genius is 
essentially dramatic.” But this assertion merely iHustrates 
the danger of meddling with hard words. For no poet, not 
even Wordsworth or Milton, was more unfitted by the 
character of his mind for genuine dramatic composition. He 
can however write fine, sounding lines in abundance, where 
self-exaltation assumes the language of self-reproach, and a 
man magnifies himself by speaking with bitter scorn of all 
things. Such are the following from the opening soliloquy 
in Manfred. 

Philosophy, and science, and the springs 
Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world, 

I have essayed; and in my mind there is 
A power to make these subject to itself : 

But they avail not. I have done men good ; 

And I have met with good even among men : 

But this availed not. I have had my foes ; 

And none have baffled, many fallen before me : 

But this availed not. Good or evil, life, 

Powers, passions, all I see in other beings, 

Have been to me as rain unto the sands, 

Since that all-nameless hour. I have no dread, 

And feel the curse to have no natural fear, 

Nor fluttering throb, that beats with hopes or wishes, 

Or lurking love of something on the earth. 

Or look at this speech in Manfred’s conversation with the 
Abbot : 

My nature was averse from life, 

And yet not cruel; for I would not make, 

But find a desolation :—like the wind, 

The red-hot breath of the most lone simoom, 

Which dwells but in the desert, and sweeps o’er 
The barren sands which bear no shrubs to blast, 

And revels o’er their wild and arid waves, 

And seeketh not, so that it is not sought, 

But being met is deadly; such hath been 
The course of my existence. 

Now if in these lines he and his be substituted for I and 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


401 


my , and they be read as a description of some third person, 
they may perhaps be grand, as the author meant that they 
should be. But at present they are altogether false, and 
therefore unpoetical. Indeed it may be laid down as an 
axiom, that, whenever the personal pronouns can be inter¬ 
changed in any passage without injury to the poetry, the 
poetry must be spurious. For no human being ever thought 
or spoke of himself, as a third person would describe him. 
Yet, such is the intelligence shewn in our ordinary criticism, 
these very passages have been cited as examples of Lord 
Byron’s dramatic genius. u. 

There is a profound knowledge of human nature in those 
lines which Shelley puts into Orsino’s mouth, in the Cenci 
(Act ii. Sc. ii.). 

It is a trick of this same family 
To analyse their own and other minds. 

Such self-anatomy shall teach the. will 
Dangerous secrets : for it tempts our powers, 

Knowing what must be thought, and may be done, 

Into the depth of darkest purposes. 

This is not at variance with what has been said in these 
last pages, but on the contrary confirms it. Self-anatomy is 
not an impossible act. It belongs however to a morbid state. 
When in health, we do not feel our own feelings, any more 
than we feel our’ limbs, or see our eyes, but their objects, 
the objects on which they were designed to act. On the 
other hand, when any part of the body becomes disordered, 
we feel it, the more so, the more violent the disorder is. 
The same thing happens in an unhealthy state of heart and 
mind, when the living communion with their objects is blockt 
up and cut off, and the blood is thrown back upon the heart, 
and our sight is filled with delusive spectra. If the Will 
gives itself up to work evil, the Conscience ever and anon 
lifts up its reproachful voice, and smites with its avenging 
sting ; whereupon the Will commands the Understanding to 
lull or stifle the Conscience with its sophistries, and to prove 
that our moral nature is a mere delusion. Hence Shakspeare 
has made his worst characters, Edmund, Iago, Richard, all 


D D 











402 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


more or less self-reflective. Even in such characters how¬ 
ever, it is necessary to track the footsteps of Nature with 
the utmost care, in order to avoid substituting a shameless, 
fiendish profession of wickedness, for the jugglings whereby 
the remaining shreds <*f our moral being would fain justify 
or palliate its aberrations. Evil, be thou my Good ! is a cry 
that could never have come from human lips. They always 
modify and mitigate it into Evil, thou art my Good. Thus 
they shake off the responsibility of making it so, and impute 
the sin of their will to their nature or their circumstances. 
Yet in nothing have the writers of spurious tragedies oftener 
gone wrong, than in their way of making their villains 
proclaim and boast of their villainy. Even poets of con¬ 
siderable dramatic genius have at times erred grievously in 
this respect, especially during the immaturity of their genius : 
witness the soliloquies of Francis Moor in Schiller’s Titanic 
first-birth. Slow too and reluctant as I am to think that 
anything can be erroneous in Shakspeare, whom Nature had 
wedded, so to say, for better, for worse, and whom she 
admitted into all the hidden recesses of her heart, still I 
cannot help thinking that even he, notwithstanding the firm 
grasp with which he is wont to hold the reins of his solar 
chariot, as it circles the world, beholding and bringing out 
every form of life in it, has somewhat exaggerated the 
diabolical element in the soliloquies ot* Richard the Third. 

I refer especially to those terrific lines just after the murder 
of Henry the Sixth. 

Down, down, to hell, and say, I sent thee thither, 

7, that have neither pity, love, nor fear. 

Indeed ’tis true, that Henry told me of: 

For I have often heard my mother say, 

I came into the world with my legs forward. 

Had I not reason, think ye, to make haste, 

And seek their ruin that usurpt our right ? 

The midwife wondered, and the women cried, 

0, Jesus bless us ! he is born with, teeth. 

And so I was ; which plainly signified, 

That I should snarl, and bite, and play the dog. 

Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so, 

Let hell make crookt my mind, to answer it. 

I had no father ; I am like no father : 

I have no brother; I am like no brother : 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


403 


And this word, Love, which greybeards call divine, 

Be resident in men like one another, 

And not in me : I am myself alone. 

Of a like character are those lines in the opening soliloquy 
of the play called by his name : 

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, 

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass,— 

I that am curtailed of this fair proportion, 

Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature, 

Deformed, unlinisht, sent before my time 
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, 

And that so lamely and unfashionably, 

That dogs bark at me, as I halt by them ;— 

Why I, in this weak piping time of peace, 

Have no delight to pass away the time, 

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun, 

And descant on my own deformity. 

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, 

To entertain these fair, well-spoken days, 

I am determined to 'prove a villain, 

And hate the idle pleasures of these days. 

How different is this bold avowal of audacious, reckless 
wickedness, from Edmund’s self-justification ! 

Why bastard ? wherefore base ? 

When my dimensions are as well compact, 

My mind as generous, and my shape as true, 

As honest madam’s issue. 

How different too is Iago’s speech ! 

And what's he then, that says , I play the villain l 
When this advice is free I give, and honest, 

Probable to thinking, and indeed the course 

To win the Moor again. For ’tis most easy 

The inclining Desdemona to subdue 

In any honest suit : she’s famed as fruitful 

As the free elements. And then for her 

To win the Moor,—were’t to renounce his baptism, 

All seals and symbols of redeemed sin,— 

His soul is so enfettered to her love, 

That she may make, unmake, do what she list, 

Even as her appetite shall play the god 

With his weak function. How am 1 then a villain, 

To counsel Cassio to this parallel course, 

Directly to his good 1 

After which inimitable bitterness of mockery at all his 
victims, and at Reason itself, how awfully does that sudden 


D D 













404 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


flash of conscience rend asunder and consume the whole net 
work of sophistry ! 

Divinity of hell! 

When devils will their blackest sins put on, 

They do suggest at first with heavenly shows, 

As I do now. 

If we compare these speeches with Richard’s, and in like 
manner if we compare the way in which Iago’s plot is first 
sown, and springs up and gradually grows and ripens in his 
brain, with Richard’s downright enunciation of his projected 
series of crimes from the first, we may discern the contrast 
between the youth and the mature manhood of the mightiest 
intellect that ever lived upon earth, a contrast almost equally 
observable in the difference between the diction and metre of 
j the two plays, and not unlike that between a great river 
j rushing along turbidly in spring, bearing the freshly melted 
snows from Alpine mountains, with flakes of light scattered 
here and there over its surface, and the same river, when its 
j waters have subsided into their autumnal tranquillity, and 
j compose a vast mirror for the whole landscape around them, 

| and for the sun and stars and sky and clouds overhead. 

It is true, Skakspeare’s youth w r as Herculean, was the 
j youth of one who might have strangled the serpents in his 
cradle. There are several things in Richard’s position, 
which justify a great difference in the representation of his 
! inward being. His rank and station pampered a more 
audacious will. The civil wars had familiarized him with 
crimes of lawless violence, and with the wildest revolutions of 
fortune. Above all, his deformity,—which Shakspeare re- 
j ceived from a tradition he did not think of questioning, and 
which he purposely brings forward so prominently in both 
the speeches quoted above,—seemed to separate and cut him 
off from sympathy and communion with his kind, and to be 
a plea for thinking that, as he was a monster in body, he 
might also be a monster in heart and conduct. In fact it is 
a common result of a natural malformation to awaken and 
irritate a morbid self-consciousness, by making a person con- 
j tinually and painfully sensible of his inferiority to his fellows: 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


405 


and this was doubtless a main agent in perverting Lord 
Byron’s character. Still I cannot but think that Shakspeare 
would have made a somewhat different use even of this 
motive, if he had rewritten the play, like King John, in the 
maturity of his intellect. Would not Richard then, like 
Edmund and Iago, have palliated and excused his crimes to 
himself, and sophisticated and played tricks with his con¬ 
science ! Would he not have denied and avowed his wicked¬ 
ness, almost with the same breath? and made the ever-waxing 
darkness of his purposes, like that of night, at once conceal 
and betray their hideous enormity ? At all events, since the 
justifications that may be alledged for Richard’s bolder 
avowals of his wickedness, result from the peculiar idio¬ 
syncrasy of his position taken along with his physical frame, 
he is a most unsafe model for other poets to follow, though a 
very tempting one, especially to young poets, many of whom 
are glad to vent their feelings of the discord between their 
ardent fancies and the actual state of the world, in railing at 
human nature, and embodying its evils in some incarnate 
fiend. Besides the main difficulties of dramatic poetry are 
smoothed down, when a writer can make his characters tell 
us how good and how bad he designs them to be. u. j 

Some readers, who might otherwise incline to acknowledge 
the truth of the foregoing observations, may perhaps be per- 
plext by the thought, that the tenour of them seems scarcely 
consistent with that Christian principle, which makes self- 
examination a part of our duty. To this scruple I might 
reply, that corruptio optimi fit pessima ; for this involves the 
true explanation of the difficulty. But the solution needs to 
be brought out more plainly. 

Now it is quite true that one of the main effects produced 
by Christianity on our nature has been to call forth our con¬ 
science, and, along therewith, our self-consciousness, into far 
greater distinctness ; which has gone on increasing with the 
progress of Christian thought. This however is only as the 
Law called forth the knowledge of sin. The Law called forth 
the knowledge of the sinfulness of the outward act, with the 









406 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


purpose of making us turn away from it, even in thought, to 
its opposite. The Gospel, completing the work of the Law, 
has called forth the knowledge of the sinfulness of our inward 
nature; not however to the end that we should brood over the 
contemplation of that sinfulness,—far less that we should 
resolve to abide and advance therein; but to the end that 
we should rise out of it, and turn away from it, to the Re¬ 
demption which has been wrought for us. To have aroused 
the consciousness of sin, without assuaging it by the glad 
tidings of Redemption, would have been to issue a sentence 
of madness against the whole human race. One cry of 
despair would have burst from every heart, as it was lasht by 
the stings of the Furies : 0 wretched man that I am , who will 
deliver me from this body of death ? And the echo from all 
the hollow caverns of earth and heaven and hell would only 
have answered, Who ? 

In truth, even in this form of self-consciousness, there is 
often a great deal of morbid exaggeration, of unhealthy, mis¬ 
chievous poring over and prying into the movements of our 
hearts and minds; which in the Romish Church has been 
stimulated feverishly by the deleterious practices of the con¬ 
fessional, and which taints many of the very best Romish 
devotional works. A vapid counterpart of this is also to be 
found in our modem sentimental religion. In the Apostles, 
on the other hand, there is nothing of the sort. Their life 
is hid with Christ in God. Their hearts and minds are 
filled with the thought and the love of Him who had redeemed 
them, and in whom they had found their true life, and with 
the work which they were to do in His service, for His glory, 
for the spreading of His kingdom. This too was one of the 
greatest and most blessed among the truths which Luther 
was especially ordained to reproclaim,—that we are not to 
spend our days in watching our own vices, in gazing at our 
own sins, in stirring and raking up all the mud of our past 
lives ; but to lift our thoughts from our own corrupt nature 
to Him who put on that nature in order to deliver it from its 
corruption, and to fix our contemplations and our affections 
on Him who came to clothe us in His perfect righteousness. 






i 


i 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 407 

and through whom and in whom, if we are united to Him 
by a living faith, we too become righteous. Thus, like the 
Apostle, are we to forget that which is behind, and to keep 
our eyes bent on the prize of our high calling, to which we 
are to press onward, and which we may attain, in Christ 
Jesus. 

I cannot enter here into the questions, how far and what 
kinds of self-examination are necessary as remedial, medicinal 
measures, in consequence of our being already in so diseased 
a condition. These are questions of ascetic discipline, the 
answers to which will vary according to the exigences of each 
particular case, even as do the remedies prescribed by a wise 
physician for bodily ailments. I merely wisht to shew that, 
in the Christian view of man, no less than in the natural, the 
healthy, normal state is not the subjective, but the objective, 
that in which, losing his own individual, insulated life, he 
finds it again in Christ, that in which he does not make him¬ 
self the object of his contemplation and action, but directs 
them both steadily and continually toward the will and the 
glory of God. 

Of course the actual changes which have thus been wrought 
in human nature by the operation of Christianity, and which 
are not confined to its religions aspect, but pervade all its 
movements, will justify and necessitate a corresponding 
difference in the poetical representations of human characters. 
Still the poet will have to keep watch against excesses and 
aberrations in this respect; and this has not been done with 
sufficient vigilance, it seems to me, in the passages which I 
have found fault with. u - 

The general opinion on the worth of an imaginative work 
may ultimately be right : immediately it is likely to be 
wrong; and this likelihood increases in proportion to the 
creative power manifested in it. The whole history of lite¬ 
rature drives us to this conclusion. There have indeed been 
cases in which the calm judgement of posterity has confirmed 
the verdict pronounced by contemporaries : but, though the 
results have been the same, the way of arriving at them was 

















408 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


different. What Jonson said of him, in whom, above all 
other men, the spirit of Poetry became incarnate, is true 
of Poetry itself: “ it is not of an age, but for all time.” In 
the very act of becoming an immanent power in the life of 
the world, it advances, as our common phrases imply, beyond 
its own age, and rises above it. Now, from the nature of 
man, there are always aspirations and yearnings in him, which 
soar beyond the ken of his understanding, and depths of 
thought and feeling, which strike down below it : wherefore 
no age has ever been able to comprehend itself, even what it 
is, much less what it is striving after and tending to. A 
Thucydides or a Burke may discern some of the principles 
which are working and seething, and may guess at the con¬ 
sequences which are to be evolved .out of them. But they 
who draw the car of Destiny cannot look back upon her: 
they are impelled onward and ever blindly onward by the 
| throng pressing at their heels. Far less can any age compre- 
! hend what is beyond it and above it. 

Besides much of the beauty in every great work of art 
must be latent. Like the Argive seer, ov So>ceI v apio-rov, dXX’ 
elvai 6e\ei. Such a work will be profound; and few can 
sound depth. It will be sublime ; and few can scan highth. 
It will have a soul in it; and few eyes can pierce through the 
body. Thus the Greek epigram on the History of Thucy¬ 
dides,— 

’42 <fii\os , el (ro(pos ei y Aa/3e fi es \epas‘ el 8e ne(f)VKas 
N rfis Movaaoiv , piy\rov a prj voeeis . 

E ipl yap ov navreo-ai faros’ navpoi 8 ayacravTO ,— 

may be regarded as more or less appropriate to every great 
work of art. So that Orator Puff’s blunder, in spending as 
many words on a riband as a Raphael, did not lie solely in 
the superior merits of the latter, but also in the greater faci¬ 
lity with which all the merits of the former were sure to be 
discerned. At the Exhibition of the King’s pictures last 
year (in 1826), Grenet’s Church, with its mere mechanical 
dexterity of perspective, had more admirers, ten to one, than 
any of Rembrandt’s wonderful masterpieces, more, fifty to 












GUESSES AT TKUTH. 


409 


one, than Yenusti’s picture of the Saviour at the foot of the 
Cross : for you will find fifty who will be delighted with an 
ingenious artifice, sooner than one who can understand art. 
Hence there is little surprising in being told that Sophocles 
was not so great a favorite on the Athenian stage as Euri¬ 
pides : what surprises me far more is, that any audience 
should ever have been found capable of deriving pleasure 
from the severe grandeur and chaste beauty of Sophocles. 
Nor is it surprising that Jonson and Fletcher should have 
been more admired than Shakspeare : the contrary would be 
surprising. Thus too, when one is told that Schiller must 
be a greater poet than Goethe, because he is more popular in 
Germany, one may reply, that, were he less popular, one 
might perhaps be readier to suppose that there may be j 
something more in him, than what thrusts itself so promi¬ 
nently on the public view. 

We are deaf, it is said, to the music of the spheres, owing 
to the narrowness and dimness and dulness of our auditory 
organs. So is it with what is grandest and loveliest in poetry. 
Few admire it, because few have perceptions capacious and 
quick and strong enough to feel it. Lessing has said (vol. 
xxvi. p. 36) : “ The true judges of poetry are at all times, in 
all countries, quite as rare as true poets themselves are.” 
Thus among my own friends, although I feel pride in reckon¬ 
ing up many of surpassing intellectual powers, I can hardly 
bethink myself of more than one possessing that calmness of 
contemplative thought, that insight into the principles and 
laws of the Imagination, that familiarity with the forms 
under which in various ages it has manifested itself, that 
happy temperature of activity not too restless or vehement, 
with a passiveness ready to receive the exact stamp and 
impression which the poet purpost to produce, and the other 
qualities requisite to fit a person for pronouncing intelligently 
and justly on questions of taste.* 

How then do great works ever become popular ? 

* This was written in 1826. Since then the opinion here exprest has 
been justified by the Essay on the Irony of Sophocles , which has been 
termed the most exquisite piece of criticism in the English language. 











410 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


In the strict sense they very seldom do. They never can 
be rightly appreciated by the bulk of mankind, because they 
can never be fully understood by them. No author, I have 
remarkt before, has been more inadequately understood than 
Shakspeare. But who, among the authors that make or 
mark a great epoch in the history of thought, imaginative or 
reflective, has fared better ? Has Plato ? or Sophocles 1 or 
Dante 1 or Bacon ? or Behmen ? or Leibnitz % or Kant % 
Their names have indeed been extolled ; but for the chief 
part of those who have extolled them, they might as well 
have written in an unknown tongue. Look only at Homer, 
whom one might deem of all poets the most easily intelligible. 
Yet how the Greek critics misunderstood him ! who found 
everything in him except a poet. How must Virgil have 
misunderstood him, when he conceived himself to be writing 
a poem like the Iliad ! How must those persons have mis¬ 
understood him, who have pretended to draw certain irrefra¬ 
gable laws of epic poetry from his works ! laws which are 
as applicable to them, as the rules of carpet-making are to 
the side of a hill in its vernal glory. How must Cowper 
have misunderstood him, when he congealed him ! and Pope, 
when he bottled up his streaming waters in couplets, and 
coloured them till they were as gaudy as a druggist’s window! 
Here, as in numberless instances, we see how, as Goethe says 
so truly, every reader 

Reads himself out of the book that he reads, nay, has he a strong mind, 
Reads himself into the book, and amalgams his thoughts with the author’s. 

Nevertheless in the course of time the judgement of the 
intelligent few determines the judgement of the unintelligent 
many. Public opinion flows through the present as through 
a marsh, scattering itself in a multitude of little brooks, 
taking any casual direction, and often stagnating sleepily; 
until the more vigorous and active have gone before, and cut 
and embankt a channel, along which it may follow them. 
Thus on the main it has one voice for the past; and that 
voice is the voice of the judicious : but it has an endless 
consort, or rather dissonance of voices for the present ; and 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


411 


amid a mob the wisest are not likely to be the loudest. 
For they have the happy feeling that Time is their ally; 
and they know that hurrying impedes, oftener than it acce¬ 
lerates. At length however, when people are persuaded that 
they ought to like a book, they are not slow in finding out 
something to like in it. Our perceptions are tractable and 
ductile enough, if we earnestly desire that they should 
I be so. u. 


Sophocles is the summit of Greek art. But one must 
have scaled many a steep, before one can estimate his highth. 
It is owing to his classical perfection, that he has generally 
been the least admired of the great ancient poets : for little 
of his beauty is discernible by a mind that is not deeply 
principled and imbued with the spirit of antiquity. The 
overpowering grandeur of Eschylus has more of that which 
bursts through every conventional barrier, and rushes at 
once to the innermost heart of man. Homer lived before 
the Greeks were cut off so abruptly from other nations, and 
their peculiar qualities were brought out, in part through 
the influences of their country, which tended to break them 
up into small states, and thus gave a political importance to 
each individual citizen,—in part through the political insti¬ 
tutions which sprang out of these causes, and naturally 
became more and more democratical,—in part through the 
workings, moral and intellectual, of Commerce, and of that 
freedom which all these circumstances combined to foster. 
Hence his national peculiarities are not so definitely markt. 
In many respects he nearly resembles those bards in other 
countries, who have lived in a like state of society. There¬ 
fore, as a child is always at home wherever he may chance to 
be, so is Homer in all countries : and thus on the whole he 
perhaps is the ancient poet who has found the most favour 
with the moderns, grossly as, we have just seen, even he has 
often been misunderstood. Next to him in popularity, if I 
mistake not, come Euripides and Ovid; who have been fondled 
in consequence of their being infected with several modern 
epidemic vices of style. They have nothing spiritual, 















j 412 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

nothing ideal, nothing mysterious. All that is valuable in 
them is spread out on the surface, often thinly as gold leaf. 
They are full of glittering points. Some of their gems are 
true ; and few persons have eyes to distinguish the false. 
They have great rhetorical pathos; and in poetry as in life 
clamorous importunity will awaken more general sympathy 
than silent distress. They are skilful in giving character- 
| istic touches, rather than in representing characters ; and the 
| former please everybody, while it requires a considerable 
j reach of imagination to apprehend and estimate the latter. 
In fine they are immoral, and talk morality. u. 

When a man says he sees nothing in a book, he very often 
means that he does not see himself in it : which, if it is not 
j a comedy or a satire, is likely enough. 

What a person praises is perhaps a surer standard, even 
than what he condemns, of his character, information, and 
i abilities. No wonder then that in this prudent country most 
people are so shy of praising anything. 

• - 

Most painters have painted themselves. So have most 
poets ; not so palpably indeed and confessedly, but still more 
assiduously. Some have done nothing else. u. 


Many persons carry about their characters in their hands; 
not a few under their feet. u. 


What a lucky fellow he would be, who could invent a 
beautifying glass ! How customers would rush to him ! A 
royal funeral would be nothing to it. Nobody would stay 
away, except the two extremes, those who were satisfied with 
themselves through their vanity, and those who were contented 
in their humility. At present one is forced to take up with 
one’s eyes; and they, spiteful creatures, won’t always beau¬ 
tify quite enough. u. 


Everybody has his own theatre, in which he is manager, 
















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


413 


actor, prompter, playwright, sceneshifter, boxkeeper, door¬ 
keeper, all in one, and audience into the bargain. u. 

A great talker ought to be affable. Else how can he look i 
to find others so ? Yet his besetting temptation is to speak, 
rather than to hear. u. 


C’est un grand malheur qu’on ne peut se battre qu’en 
combattant. u. 


Nothing is accounted so proper in England as property. 
En France le propre est la proprete. u. 


I have mentioned individuality of character above (p. 94) 
among the distinctive qualities of the English. Not j 
however that it is peculiarly ours, but common to us with j 
the other nations of the Teutonic race, between whom and 
those nations in whose character, as in their language, the j 
Latin blood is predominant, there is a remarkable contrast 
in this respect. Landor, having resided many years among 
the latter, could not fail to notice this. “ I have often j 
observed more variety (he makes Puntomichino say) in a 
single English household, than I believe to exist in all 
Italy.” Solger ( Briefwechsel , p. 82) has a like remark with 
reference to the French : “ A certain general outward culture 
makes them all know how to keep in their station, each 
doing just as his neighbours do ; so that one seldom meets 
among them with that interesting and instructive originality, 
which in other nations is so often found in the lower orders. 

In France all classes have much the same sort of education, 
a superficial one enough, it is true ; but hence even the 
meanest are able to hold up their heads.” 

Talk to a dozen Englishmen on any subject : there will i 
be something peculiar and characteristic in the remarks of | 
each. Talk to a dozen Frenchmen : they will all make the 
very same remark, and almost in the same words. Nor is 
this merely a delusive appearance, occasioned by a stranger’s 
inattention to the minuter shades of difference, as in a flock 















414 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


of sheep an inexperienced eye will not discern one from 
another. It is that the generic and specific qualities are 
proportionally stronger in them, that they all tread in the 
same sheeptrack, that they all follow their noses, and that 
their noses, like those of cattle when a storm is coming on, 
all point the same way. A traveler cannot go far in the 
country, but something will be said about passports. I have 
heard scores of people talk of them at different times. Of 
course they all thought them excellent things : this belongs 
to their national vanity. What surprised me was, that they 
every one thought them excellent things for the self-same 
reason,—because they prevent thieves and murderers from 
escaping ... a reason learnt by rote, concerning which 
they had never thought of asking whether such was indeed 
the fact. 

Let me relate another instance in point. I happened to 
be in Paris at the time of the great eclipse in 1820, and was 
watching it from the gardens of the Tuileries. Several 
voices, out of a knot of persons near me, cried out one after 
the other, Ah, comme cest dr die! Regarded, comme c'est 
drdle. My own feelings not being exactly in this key, I 
walkt away, but in vain. Go whither I would, the same 
sounds haunted me. Old men and children, young men and 
maidens, all joined in the same cuckoo cry : C*est bien drdle ! 
Regardez, comme cest drdle. Ah, comme c'est drdle. Paris 
had tongues enough; for these are never scarce there. 
But it seemed only to have a single mind : and this mind, 
even under the aspect of that portent which “perplexes 
nations,” could not contain or give utterance to more than 
one thought or feeling, that what they saw was bien drdle. u. 

The monotonousness of French versification is only a type 
of that which pervades the national character, and here¬ 
with, of necessity, the representative and exponent of that 
character, their literature, since the age of Louis the Four¬ 
teenth. But this ready suppression, or rather imperfect 
development, of those features which constitute individuality 
of character, is common, as I remarkt before, more or less 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


415 I 


to all the nations of the Latin stock : and it is scarcely less 
noticeable in the Romans, than in the rest. Indeed this is 
one main difference, to which most of the others are referable, 
between the literature of the Greeks and that of the Romans. 
Hence, for instance, the Greeks, like ourselves and the 
Germans, had dramatic poetry, the essence of which lies in 
the revelation of the inner man ; whereas the Roman drama, 
at least in its higher departments, was an alien growth. 
Moreover in Greek literature every author is himself, and 
has distinctive qualities whereby you may recognize him. 
But every Roman writer, as Frederic Schlegel has justly 
observed, “ is in the first place a Roman, and next a Roman 
of a particular age.” That portion of him which is pecu¬ 
liarly his own, is ever the least. Pars minima ipse sui. You 
may find page after page in Tacitus and Seneca and the elder 
Pliny, which, but for the difference of subject, might have 
been composed by any one of the three : and if Lucan had 
not written in verse, the trio might have been a quartett. u. 

The Romans had no love of Beauty, like the Greeks. 
They held no communion with Nature, like the Germans. 
Their one idea was Rome, not ancient, fabulous, poetical 
Rome, but Rome warring and conquering, and orbis terrarum 
domina. S. P. Q. R. is inscribed on almost every page of 
their literature. With the Greeks all forein nations were 
/3 dppapoi, outcasts from the precincts of the Muses. To the 
Roman every stranger was a hostis, until he became a slave. 
Only compare the Olympic with the gladiatorial games. 
The object of the former was to do homage to Nature, and 
to exalt and glorify her excellent gifts ; that of the latter to 
appease the thirst for blood, when it was no longer quencht 
in the blood of foes. None but a Greek was deemed worthy 
of being admitted to the first: but a Roman would have 
thought himself degraded by a mimic combat, in which the 
victory lay rather with the animal, than with the intellectual 
part of man. He left such sport to his jesters, slaves, and 
wild beasts. To him a triumph was the ideal and sum total 
of happiness : and verily it was something grand. u. 










416 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

Milton has been compared to Raphael. He is much more 
like Michaelangelo. Michaelangelo is the painter of the 
Old Testament, Raphael of the New. Now Milton, as 
Wordsworth has said of him, was a Hebrew in soul. He was 
grand, severe, austere. He loved to deal with the primeval, 
elementary forms both of inanimate nature and of human, 
before the manifold, ever multiplying combinations of thought 
and feeling had shaped themselves into the multifarious com¬ 
plexities of human character. Both Samson and Comus are 
equally remote from the realities of modern humanity. He 
would have been a noble prophet. Among the Greeks, his 
imagination, like that of Eschylus, would have dwelt among 
the older gods. He wants the gentleness of Christian love, 
of that feeling to which the least thing is precious, as 
springing from God, and claiming kindred with man. 

Where to find a parallel for Raphael in the modern world, 
I know not. Sophocles, among poets, most resembles him. 
In knowledge of the diversities of human character, he 
comes nearer than any other painter to him, who is unap- 
proacht and unapproachable, Shakspeare; and yet two 
worlds, that of Humour, and that of Passion, separate them. 
In exquisiteness of art, Goethe might be compared to him. 
But neither he nor Shakspeare has Raphael’s deep Christian 
feeling. And then there is such a peculiar glow and blush 
of beauty in his works : whithersoever he comes, he sheds 
beauty from his wings. 

Why did he die so early ? Because morning cannot last 
till noon, nor spring through summer. Early too as it was, 
he had lived through two stages of his art, and had carried 
both to their highest perfection. This rapid progressiveness 
of mind he also had in common with Shakspeare and Goethe, 
and with few others. u. 


The readers of the Giaour will remember the narrow arch, 
over which the faithful are to enter into Paradise. In fact 
this arch was the edge of the sword, or rather of the arched 
scimitar. Hereby, if they wielded it bravely and mur¬ 
derously, the Mussulmen thought they should attain to that 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


417 


Garden of Bliss. Hence too did they deem it their duty to 
drive all men thither, even along that narrow and perilous 
bridge ; far more excusable in so doing, than those who have 
used like murderous weapons against their Christian brethren, 
in the belief that they were casting them, not into heaven, 
but into hell. Even in minor matters the sword is a perilous 
instrument whereby to seek one’s aim. Compulsion is not, 
and never can be conviction. They exclude each other, u. 

Musicians, at least dilettanti ones, are apt to complain of 
those who encore a tune, as having no true feeling for the 
art. It should be remembered however, that the peculiarity 
of music is, that its parts can never be perceived contem¬ 
poraneously, but only in succession. Yet no work of art can 
be understood, unless we have conceived the idea of it as a 
whole, and can discern the relations of its parts to each 
other as members of that whole. To judge of a picture, a 
statue, a building, we look at it again and again, both in its 
unity and in its details. So too do we treat a poem, which 
combines the objective permanence of the last-mentioned 
arts, with the successive development belonging to music. 
But until we know a piece of music, until we have heard it 
through already, it is scarcely possible for any ear to under¬ 
stand it. The sturdiest asserter of the organic unity of 
works of art will not pretend that he could construct a play 
of Shakspeare or of Sophocles out of a single scene, or even 
that he could construct a single speech out of the preceding 
ones ; although, when he has read and carefully examined 
it, he may maintain that all its parts hang together by a 
sort of inherent, inviolable necessity. The habit of lavishing 
all one’s admiration on striking parts, independently of their 
relation to the whole, does indeed betoken a want of ima¬ 
ginative perception, and of proper esthetical culture. In 
true works of art too the beauty of the parts is raised to a 
higher power by the living idea which pervades the whole, as 
the physical beauty of Kaphael’s Virgins is by their relation 
to their Divine Child. But for that very reason do we gaze 
on them with greater intentness, and return to them again 








418 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


and again. Nay, does not Nature herself teach us to encore 
tunes % Her songsters repeat their songs over and over, 
with endless iteration. u. 

Wisdom is Alchemy. Else it could not be Wisdom. 
This is its unfailing characteristic, that it “ finds good in every¬ 
thing,” that it renders all things more precious. In this 
respect also does it renew the spirit of childhood within us : 
while foolishness hardens our hearts, and narrows our 
thoughts, it makes us feel a childlike curiosity and a child¬ 
like interest about all things. When our view is confined to 
ourselves, nothing is of value, except what ministers in one 
way or other to our own personal gratification : but in pro¬ 
portion as it widens, our sympathies increase and multiply : 
and when we have learnt to look on all things as God’s 
works, then, as His works, they are all endeared to us. 

Hence nothing can be further from true wisdom, than the 
mask of it assumed by men of the world, who affect a cold 
indifference about whatever does not belong to their own 
immediate circle of interests or pleasures. u. 

It were much to be wisht that some philosophical scholar 
would explain the practical influence of religion in the 
ancient world. Much has been done of late for ancient 
mythology, which itself, until the time of Voss, was little 
better than a confused, tangled mass. Greek and Roman 
fables of all ages and se#3s were jumbled together indis¬ 
criminately, with an interloper here and there from Egypt, 
or from the East ; and, whether found in Homer or in 
Tzetzes, they were all supposed to belong to the same whole. 
Voss, not John Gerard, but John Henry, did a good service 
in trying to bring some sort of order and distinctness into 
this medley. But he mostly left out of sight, that one of 
the chief elements in mythology is the religious. His 
imagination too was rather that of a kitchen-garden, than 
either of a flower-garden, or a forest : his favorite flowers 
were cauliflowers. Since his days there have been many 
valuable contributions toward the history and genesis of 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


419 


mythology by Welcker, Ottfried Mueller, Buttmann, and 
others; though the master mind that is to discern and 
unfold the organic idea is still wanting. 

Mythology however is not Religion. It may rather be 
regarded as the ancient substitute, the poetical counterpart, 
for dogmatic theology. In addition to this, we require to 
know what was the Religion of the ancients, what influence 
Religion exercised over their feelings, over their intellect, 
over their will, over their views of life, and their actions. 
This too must be a historical work, distinguishing what 
belongs to different ages, giving us fragmentary representa¬ 
tions where nothing more is discoverable, and carefully 
eschewing the attempt to complete and restore the fragments 
of one age by pieces belonging to another. Here also we 
shall find progressive stages, faith, superstition, scepticism, 
secret and open unbelief, which slid or rolled back into new 
forms of arbitrary superstition. u. 

Many learned men, Grotius, for instance, and Wetstein, 
have taken pains to illustrate the New Testament by quoting 
all the passages they could collect from the writers of classical 
antiquity, expressing sentiments in any way analogous to the 
doctrines and precepts of the Gospel. This some persons 
regard as a disparagement to the honour of the Gospel, 
which they would fain suppose to have come down all at 
once from heaven, like a meteoric stone from a volcano in 
the moon, consisting of elements wholly different from any¬ 
thing found upon earth. But surely it is no disparagement 
to the wisdom of God, or to the dignity of Reason, that the 
development of Reason should be preceded by corresponding 
instincts, and that something analogous to it should be found 
even in inferior animals. It is no disparagement to the sun, 
that he should be preceded by the dawn. On the contrary this 
is his glory, as it was also that of the Messiah, that, in the 
words with which Milton describes His approach to battle, 
“ far off His coming shone.” If there had been no instincts 
in man leading him to Christianity, no yearnings and 
cravings, no stings of conscience and aspirations, for it to 


k e 2 






420 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


quiet and satisfy, it would have been no religion for man. 
Therefore, instead of shrinking from the notion that anything 
at all similar to any of the doctrines of Christianity may be 
found in heathen forms of religion, let us seek out all such 
resemblances diligently, giving thanks to God that He has 
never left Himself wholly without a witness. When we 
have found them all, they will only be single rays darting up 
here and there, forerunners of the sunrise. Subtract the 
whole amount of them from the Gospel, and quite enough 
will remain to bless God for, even the whole Gospel. u. 

Everybody knows and loves the beautiful story of the dog 
Argus, who just lives through the term of his master’s 
absence, and sees him return to his home, and recognizes 
him, and rejoicing in the sight dies. Beautiful too as the 
story is in itself, it has a still deeper allegorical interest. 
For how many Arguses have there been, how many will there 
be hereafter, the course of whose years has been so ordered, 
that they will have just lived to see their Lord come and 
take possession of His home, and in their joy at the blissful 
sight have departed ! How many such spirits, like Simeon’s, 
will swell the praises of Him who spared them that He 
might save them. 

When watching by a deathbed, I have heard the cock 
crow as a signal for the spirit to take its flight from this 
world. This, I believe, is a common hour for such a journey. 
It is a comfortable thought, to regard the sufferer as having 
past through the night, and lived to see the dawn of an 
eternal day. Perhaps some thought of this kind flitted 
through the mind of Socrates, when he directed his sacrifice 
to Esculapius. Mr. Evans has thought fit, in his life of 
Justin Martyr, when comparing the end of Justin with that 
of Socrates, to rebuke the latter as “ a mere moralist,” who 
u exhibited in his last words a trait of gross heathen super¬ 
stition.” Surely this is neither wise nor just. It was not 
owing to any fault in Socrates, that he was not a Christian, 
that he was “ a mere moralist.” On the contrary, it is a 
glorious thing that he should have been a moralist, and such 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


421 


a moralist, amid the darkness of Heathenism; and his glory 
is increast by his having recognized the duty of retaining a 
positive worship, while he saw its abuses, by his having been 
a philosopher, and yet not an unbeliever. I never could 
understand how it is necessary for the exaltation of 
Christianity to depreciate Socrates, any more than how it is 
requisite for the exaltation of the Creator to revile all the 
works of His Creation. u. 


The Rabbis tell, that, when Moses was about to lead the 
children of Israel out of Egypt, he remembered the promise 
made to Joseph, that his bones should be carried with them, 
and buried in the Land of Promise. But not knowing how 
to make out which were the real bones of Joseph, among the 
many laid in the same sepulcre, he stood at the entrance of the 
sepulcre, and cried, Bones of Joseph, come forth ! Whereupon 
the bones rose up and came toward him. With thankful 
rejoicing he gathered them together, and bore them away to 
the tents of Israel. 

Strange as this fable may seem, it is the likeness of a 
stranger reality, which we may see in ourselves and in others. 
For when our spirits, being awakened to the sense of their 
misery and slavery, are roused by the voice of some great 
Deliverer to go forth into the land of freedom and hope, do 
we not often turn back to the sepulcres in the house of our 
bondage, in which from time to time we have laid up such 
parts of ourselves as seemed to belong to a former stage of 
being, expecting to find them living, and able to answer the 
voice which calls them to go forth with us ? It is only by 
repeated disappointments, that we are taught no longer to 
seek the living among the dead, but to proceed on our 
pilgrimage, bearing the tokens of mortality along with us, 
in the assurance that, if we do bear them patiently and faith¬ 
fully, until we come to the Land of Life, we may then deposit 
them in their true home, as precious seeds of immortality, 
which, though sown in corruption and dishonour and weakness, 
will be raised in incorruption and glory and power. e. 












422 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


When will the earth again hear the glad announcement, 
that the people bring much more than enough for the service of 
the work, which the Lord commanded to make (Exod. xxxvi. 
5) ? Yet, until we bring more than enough, at least until 
we are kindled by a spirit which will make us desire to do 
so, we shall never bring enough. And ought we not ? Your 
economists will say No. They, who would think the sun a 
useful creature, if he would come down from the sky and 
light their fires, will gravely reprehend such wasteful extra¬ 
vagance. At the same time no doubt they will continually 
be guilty of far greater and more wasteful. 

Among the numberless marvels, at which nobody marvels, 
few are more marvellous than the recklessness with which 
priceless gifts, intellectual and moral, are squandered and 
thrown away. Often have I gazed with wonder at the 
prodigality displayed by Nature in the cistus, which unfolds 
hundreds or thousands of its white starry blossoms morning 
after morning, to shine in the light of the sun for an hour 
or two, and then fall to the ground. But who, among the 
sons and daughters of men,—gifted with thoughts “ which 
wander through eternity,” and with powers which have the 
godlike privilege of working good, and giving happiness,— 
who does not daily let thousands of these thoughts drop to 
the ground and rot? who does not continually leave his 
powers to draggle in the mould of their own leaves ? The 
imagination can hardly conceive the hights of greatness and 
glory to which mankind would be raised, if all their thoughts 
and energies were to be animated with a living purpose,—or 
even those of a single people, or of the educated among a 
single people. But as in a forest of oaks, among the millions 
of acorns that fall every autumn, there may perhaps be one 
in a million that will grow up into a tree, somewhat in like 
manner fares it with the thoughts and feelings of man. 

What then must be our confusion, when we see all these 
wasted thoughts and feelings rise up in the Judgement, and 
bear witness against us ! 

But how are we to know whether they are wasted or not ? 

We have a simple, infallible test. Those which are laid up 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


423 


in heaven, those which are laid up in any heavenly work, those 
whereby we in any way carry on the work of God upon earth, 
are not wasted. Those which are laid up on earth, in any mere 
earthly work, in carrying out our own ends, or the ends of the 
Spirit of Evil, are heirs of death from the first, and can only 
rise out of it for a moment, to sink back into it for ever. u. 

People seem to think that love toward God must be some¬ 
thing totally different in kind from the love which we feel 
toward our fellow-creatures, nay, as though it might exist 
without any feeling at all. If we believed that it ought to 
be the same feeling, which is excited by a living friend upon 
earth, higher and purer, but not less real or warm, and if we 
tried our hearts, to see whether it is in us, by the same tests, 
there would be less self-deception on this point; and we 
should more easily be convinced that we must be wholly 
destitute of that, of which we can show no lively token. a. 

The difference between heathen virtue and Christian good¬ 
ness is the difference between oars and sails, or rather between 
gallies and ships. 

God never does things by halves. He never leaves any 
work unfinisht: they are all wholes from the first. There 
are no demigods in Scripture. What is God is perfect God. 
What is man is mere man. 

The power of Faith will often shine forth the most, where 
the character is naturally weak. There is less to intercept 
and interfere with its workings. a. 

In the outward course of events we are often ready to see 
the hand of God in great things, but refuse to own it in 
small. In like manner it often happens that even they, who 
in heavy trials look wholly to God for strength and support, 
will in lesser matters trust to themselves. This is the 
source of the weakness and inconsistency betrayed by many, 
who yet on great occasions will act rightly. 


a. 















424 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


A blind man lets himself be led by a child. So must 
we be brought to feel, and to acknowledge to ourselves, that 
we are blind ; and then the time may come when a little 
Child shall lead us. u. 


Love, it has been said, descends more abundantly than it 
ascends. The love of parents for their children has always 
been far more powerful than that of children for their parents : 
and who among the sons of men ever loved God with a 
thousandth part of the love wjiich God has manifested 
to us ? A. 

By giving the glory of good actions to man, instead of to 
God, we weaken the power of example. If such or such a 
grace be the growth of such or such a character, our charac¬ 
ter, which is different, may be quite unable to attain to it. 
But if it be God’s work in the soul, then on us too may He 
vouchsafe to bestow the same gift as on our neighbour. a. 

In darkness there is no choice. It is light, that enables 
us to see the differences between things : and it is Christ, 
that gives us light. 

What is snow ? Is it that the angels are shedding their 
feathers on the earth h Or is the sky showering its blossoms 
on the grave of the departed year ? In it we see that, if the 
Earth is to be arrayed in this vesture of purity, her raiment 
must descend on her from above. Alas too ! we see in it, 
how soon that pure garment becomes spotted and sullied, 
how soon it mostly passes away. There is something in it 
singularly appropriate to the season of our Lord’s Nativity, 
as Milton has so finely urged in his Hymn. 

Nature in awe to Him 
Had doft her gaudy trim, 

With her great Master so to sympathize. 

Only with speeches fair 

She wooes the gentle air 

To hide her guilty front with innocent snow, 

And on her naked shame, 

Pollute with sinful blame, 

The saintly veil of maiden white to throw; 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


425 


Confounded that her Maker’s eyes 

Should look so near upon her foul deformities. 

For this, as well as for other reasons, it was happy that 
the Nativity was placed in December. u. 


Written at Cambridge , January 15 th, 1817. 


Mighty Magician, Nature ! I have heard 
Of rapid transformations,—in my dreams 
Seen how with births the mind at freedom teems,— 
Seen how the trees their gallant vestments gird 
In Spring’s all-pregnant hour. But thou excellest 
All fabled witchery, all the mind’s quick brood ; 

Even thyself thou dost surpass. What mood 
Of wanton power is this, in which thou wellest 
From thy impenetrable source, to pour 
A flood of milk-white splendour o’er the earth ! 
Shedding such tranquil joy on Winter hoar, 

More pure than jocund Spring’s exulting mirth,— 

A joy like that sweet calmness, which is sent 
To soothe the parting hour, where life is innocent. 

Yes, lovely art thou, Nature, as the death 
Of righteous spirits. Yesternight I sate, 

And gazed, and all the scene was desolate. 

I wake, and all is changed,—as though the breath 
Of sleep had borne me to another world, 

The abode of innocence. Still a few flakes 
Drop, soft as falling stars. The sun now makes 
The dazzling snow more dazzling. Flowers up-curled 
In sleep thus swiftly scarce their bloom unfold, 

As these wide plains, so lately blank, disclose 
Their lilied face. The nun, whose streaming hair 
Is shorn, arrayed in spotless white behold : 

And Earth, when shorn of all her verdure, glows, 

In her bright veil, more saintly and more fair. 

An hour have I been standing, and have gazed 
On this pure field of snow, smooth as a lake, 

When every wind is husht; and no thought brake 
The trance of pleasure which the vision raised. 

Or, if a thought intruded, ’twas desire 
To lean my fevered cheek upon that breast 
Of virgin softness, and to taste the rest 
Its beauty seemed to promise. But the fire 
Would not more surely mock my erring grasp. 

No faith is found, no permanence, in form 
Of loveliness, not e’en in woman’s. Love 
Must stand on some more stable base, must clasp 
Round objects more enduring, life more warm : 

His only food the soul, his only home above. 















425 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

And now another thought intrudes to mar 

The quiet of my musings, like a sound 

Of thunder groaning through Night’s still profound, 

And lures me to wage reckless, impious war 
Against the beauty of that silver main,— 

To violate it with my feet, to tread 

O’er all its charms, to stain its spotless bed, — 

As some lewd wretch would a fair vii’gin stain. 

Whence this wild, wayward fantasy ? My soul 
Would shrink with horrour from such deed of shame. 

Yet oft, amid our passions restless roll, 

We love with wrong to dally without aim.* 

Alas ! too soon the angel visitant 

In Nature’s course will leave our earthly haunt. tt. 


January 17 th, 1817. 

I said, our angel visitant would flee 

Too soon, unknowing with what truth I spoke. 

For he is gone, already gone, like smoke 
Of mists dissolving o’er the morning lea. 

The faint star melts in daylight’s dawning beam ; 

The thin cloud fades in ether’s ci*ystal sea ; 

Thoughts, feelings, words, spring forth, and cease to be : 

And thou hast also vanisht, like a dream 
Of Childhood come to cheer Earth’s hoary age, 

As though the aged Earth herself had dreamt,— 

Viewless as hopes, fleeting as joys of youth ; 

And, bright as was thine air-born equipage, 

It only served fallaciously to tempt 

With visionary bliss, and bore no heart of truth. 

How like to Joy in everything thou art ! 

Who earnest to smile upon our wintry way, 

Like in thy brightness, like in thy decay, 

A moment radiant to delude the heart. 

And what of thee remains ? Nought,— save the tear 
In which thou diest away ;—save that the field 
Has now relaxt its bosom late congealed, 

As frozen hearts will in some short career 
Of gladness open, looking for the spring, 

And find it not, and sink back into ice ;— 

Save that the brooks rush turbidly along, 

Flooding their banks : thus, after reveling 
In some brief rapturous dream of Paradise, 

In passionate recoil our roused affections throng. u. 

The French rivers partake of the national character. 
Many of them look broad, grand and imposing; but they 
have no depth. And the greatest river in the country, the 

* “To dally with wrong that does no harm.” Coleridge, Christabel. 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


427 


Rhone, loses half its usefulness from the impetuosity of its 
current. 


True goodness is like the glowworm in this, that it shines 
most when no eyes, except those of heaven, are upon it. u. 

He who does evil that good may come, pays a toll to the 
devil to let him into heaven. 


Many Italian girls are said to profane the black veil by 
taking it against their will; and so do many English girls 
profane the white one. 

The hulk of men, in choosing a wife, look out for a 
Fornarina : a few in youth dream about finding a Belle 
Jardiniere. u. 


We are so much the creatures of habit, that no great and 
sudden change can at first be altogether agreeable . . . unless 
it be here and there a honeymoon. a. 

Our appetites were given to us to preserve and to propagate 
life. We abuse them for its destruction. a. 

The mind is like a sheet of white paper in this, that the 
impressions it receives the oftenest, and retains the longest, 
are black ones. 

N one but a fool is always right; and his right is the most 
unreasonable wrong. 

The difference between a speech and an essay should be 
something like that between a field of battle and a parade, u. 

What do our clergy lose by reading their sermons ? They 
lose preaching, the preaching of the voice in many cases, the 
preaching of the eye almost always. 



















428 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Histories used often to be stories. The fashion now is to 
leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed : the facts 
are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat sometimes is by 
the fat. _ u - 

C est affreux comme il estpdle ! il devroit mettre un peu de 
rouge : cried a woman out of the crowd, as the First Consul 
rode by at a review in 1802. She thought a general ought 
to shew a little blood in his cheeks. One might say the 
same of sundry modern philosophical treatises. u. 

Some persons give one the notion of an abyss of shallow¬ 
ness. These terms may seem contradictory ; but, like so 
many other contradictions, they have met and shaken hands 
in human nature. All such a man’s thoughts, all his feelings, 
are superficial; yet, try him where you will, you cannot get 
to a firm footing. u. 

A historian needs a peculiar discernment for that which is 
important and essential and generative in human affairs. 
This is one of the main elements of the historical genius, as 
it is of the statesmanly. u. 

A statesman should have ears to hear the distant rustling 
of the wings of Time. Most people only catch sight of it, 
when it is flying away. When it is overhead, it darkens their 
view. u. 


La France , d est moi , disoit Louis XIV. Mais son ambition 
n’ etoit que mediocre : car, le monde, d est moi, dit tout le 
monde. u. 


An epicure is said to have complained of a haunch of 
venison, as being too much for one, yet not enough for two. 
Bonaparte thought the same of the world. What a great 
man he must have been then! To be sure : ambition is 
just as valid a proof of a strong and sound mind, as gorman¬ 
dising is of a strong and sound body. XJ. 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 429 

The memory ought to be a store-room. Many turn theirs 
rather into a lumber-room. Nay, even stores grow mouldy 
and spoil, unless aired and used betimes ; and then they too 
become lumber. u. 


At Havre I saw some faces from the country, which re¬ 
minded me of our old monuments, and shewed me what the 
beauties must have been, that inspired the chivalry of our 
Henries and Edwards. They were long, almost to a fault, 
regular, tranquil, unobservant, with the clearest, freshest 
bloom. At Rouen these faces are no longer met with; and 
one finds oneself quite in France, the only country in civi¬ 
lized Europe where beauty is of the composite order, made 
up of prettiness, liveliness, sparkling eyes, artificial flowers, 
and a shawl,—the only region between Lapland and Morocco, 
where youth is without bloom, and age without dignity. 

Expression is action ; beauty is repose. 

People say, St. Peter’s looks larger every time they see it. 
It does more. It seems to grow larger, while the eye is 
fixt on it, even from the very door, and then expands, as you 
go forward, almost like our idea of God. 

Hie Rhodus ; hie salta. Do not wait for a change of out¬ 
ward circumstances ; but take your circumstances as they 
are, and make the best of them. This saying, which was 
meant to shame a braggart, will admit of a very different 
and profounder application. Goethe has changed the postu¬ 
late of Archimedes, Give me a standing-place , and I will move 
the world , into the precept, Make good thy standing-place, and 
move the world. This is what he did throughout his life. So 
too was it that Luther moved the world, not by waiting for 
a favorable opportunity, but by doing his daily work, by 
doing God’s will day by day, without thinking of looking 
beyond. We ought not to linger in inaction until Blucher 
comes up, but, the moment we catch sight of him in the dis¬ 
tance, to rise and charge. Hercules must go to Atlas, and 










430 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


take his load off his shoulders perforce. This too is the 
meaning of the maxims in Wilhelm Meister : Here, or nowhere , 
is Herrnhut: Here, or nowhere, is America. We are not to 
keep on looking out for the coming of the Kingdom of 
Heaven, but to believe firmly, and to acknowledge that it is 
come, and to live and act in that knowledge and assurance. 
Then will it indeed be come for us. u. 


The business of Philosophy is to circumnavigate human 
nature. Before we start, we are told that we shall find 
people who stand head-downwards, with their feet against 
ours. Very many won’t believe this, and swear it must be 
all a hoax. Many take fright at the thought, and resolve to 
stay at home, where their peace will not be disturbed by such 
preposterous visions. Of those who set out, many stop half 
way, among the antipodes, and insist that standing head- 
downwards is the true posture of every reasonable being. 
It is only the favoured few, who are happy enough to com¬ 
plete the round, and to get home again; where they find 
everything just as they left it, save that henceforward they 
see it in its relations to the world, of which it forms a part. 
This too is the proof that they have indeed completed the 
round, their getting back to their home, and not feeling 
strange, but at home in it. u. 


The common notion of the Ideal, as exemplified more 
especially in the Painting of the last century, degrades it 
into a mere abstraction. It was assumed that, to raise an 
object into an ideal, you must get rid of everything indivi¬ 
dual about it. Whereas the true ideal is the individual, 
purified and potentiated, the individual freed from every¬ 
thing that is not individual in it, with all its parts pervaded 
and animated and harmonized by the spirit of life which 
flows from the centre. 

This blunder however ran cheek by jowl with another, 
much like a pair of mules dragging the mind of man to the 
palace of the Omnipotent Nonentity. For the purport of 
the Essay on the Human Understanding, like that of its unac- 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


431 


knowledged parent, and that of the numerous fry which 
sprang from it, was just the same, to maintain that we have 
no ideas, or, what amounts to the same thing, that our ideas 
are nothing more than abstractions, defecated by divers pro¬ 
cesses of the Understanding. Thus flame, for instance, is an 
abstraction from coal, a rose from a clod of earth, life from 
food, thought from sense, God from the world, which itself is 
only a prior abstraction from Chaos. 

There is no hope of arriving at Truth, until we have learnt 
to acknowledge that the creatures of Space and Time are, as 
it were, so many chambers of the prisonhouse, in which the 
timeless, spaceless Ideas of the Eternal Mind are shut up, 
and that the utmost reach of Abstraction is, not to create, 
but to liberate, to give freedom and consciousness to that, 
which existed potentially and in embryo before. u. 

The word encyclopedia, which of late years has emerged 
from the study of the philosopher, and is trundled through 
every street and alley by such as go about teaching the 
rudiments of omniscience, is an example how language is 
often far wiser than the people who make use of it. The 
framers of words, as has been remarkt already (p. 219), 
seem not seldom to have been gifted with something like a 
spirit of divination, which enabled them to see more than 
they distinctly perceived, to anticipate more than they 
knew. The royal stamp however, which was legible when 
the word was first issued, is often rubbed off ; and it is worn 
down until one hardly knows what it was meant to be. The 
word encyclopedia implies the unity and circularity of know¬ 
ledge,—that it has one common central principle, which is 
at once constitutive and regulative : for there can be no 
circle without a centre ; and it is by an act emanating from 
the centre, that the circle must be constructed. Moreover 
the name implies that in knowledge, as in being, there is 
not merely a progression, but a returning upon itself, that 
the alpha and omega coincide, and that the last and fullest 
truth must be the selfsame with the first germinal truth, 
that it must be, as it were, the full-grown oak which was 






432 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


latent in the acorn. Whereas our encyclopedias are neither 
circular, nor have they any centre. If they have the 
slightest claim to such a title, it can only be as round 
robins, all the sciences being tost together in them just as 
the whim of the alphabet has dictated. Indeed one might 
almost fancy that a new interpretation of the name had 
been devised, and that henceforward it was to mean, all 
knowledge in a penny piece. u. 

Dugald Stewart, in trying, at the beginning of his Philo¬ 
sophy of the Human Mind , to account for the prejudice 
commonly entertained in England against metaphysical 
speculations, urges “the frivolous and absurd discussions 
which abound in the writings of most metaphysical authors,” 
as the justifying cause of this prejudice. Hereby, it appears 
shortly after, he especially means “ the vain and unprofitable 
disquisitions of the Schoolmen.” No doubt too he would 
subsequently have rankt “the vain and unprofitable dis¬ 
quisitions ” of Kant and his successors along with them. 
Here we find a singular phenomenon in the history of 
causation. A cause, which acts attractively in its own 
neighbourhood, is assumed to act repulsively at a distance, 
both in time and in space. The Scholastic Philosophy, 
which so fascinated the thoughtful in its own age, the 
modern Philosophy of Germany, by which almost every 
intellect in that country has been more or less possest and 
inspired, are the cause why we in England and in these days 
care so little about the Philosophy of the Human Mind. 
Conversely he may perhaps have consoled himself by arguing, 
that, as so few people in his days cared about the Philosophy 
of the Human Mind, multitudes, according to the law of 
compensation, will take the deepest interest in it hereafter; 
and that Reid’s Philosophy is like a rocket, which has 
nothing very captivating while one holds it in one’s hands, 
yet which will spread out into a stream of light, when it 
mounts to a distance. But 0 no ! These very speculations, 
which are condemned as “ vain and unprofitable,” are the 
speculations which come home to men’s hearts and bosoms, 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


433 


and stir and kindle them. When we are told that we are 
bundles of habits, that our minds are sheets of white paper, 
that our thoughts are the extract of our sensations, that our 
conscience is a mere ledger of profit and loss, we turn to the 
practical business of life, as furnishing nobler subjects to 
occupy our time with. When we are told of our immortal, 
heavenborn nature, of the eternal laws of Reason, of 
Imagination, of Conscience, we start out of our torpour; 
and our hearts respond to the voice which calls us to such 
contemplations. Surely the countrymen of Locke and 
Hume and Hartley and Reid and Priestley and Paley might 
have nearer reasons for disregarding metaphysics, than those 
found in the subtilties of Scotus and Aquinas,—of whom, be 
it remembered, they knew nothing. u. 

A similar habit of thought led the same writer to say, in 
his Dissertation on the Progress of Philosophy , prefixt to the 
Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica (p. 25) : “ In 
modern times this influence of names is, comparatively 
speaking, at an end. The object of a public teacher is no 
longer to inculcate a particular system of dogmas, but to 
prepare his pupils for exercising their own judgements, to 
exhibit to them an outline of the different sciences, and to 
suggest subjects for their future examination.” Now what 
is the result of this change 1 That the pupil’s mind is 
mazed and bewildered in a labyrinth of outlines,—that he 
knows not whither to turn his steps, or where to fix,—that 
the “ future examination ” is postponed sine die ,—and that 
he leaves the university knowing a little about everything, 
but knowing nothing. No good was ever effected by filling 
a student’s mind with outlines. It is to sow the husk, 
instead of the kernel. 

“It was in consequence (Mr Stewart adds in a Note) of 
this mode of conducting education, by means of oral in¬ 
struction alone, that the different sects of philosophy arose 
in ancient Greece.” One might have fancied that this 
instance would have sufficed to shew what a powerful in¬ 
fluence may be exercised in this manner, by a teacher who 







434 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


knows how to act upon the minds and the affections of his 
hearers; wherefore the aim of a wise teacher should be to 
make the most of so useful an instrument, taking care to 
a pply it to a right purpose. For what example does the 
history of literature present of a study flourishing as Phi¬ 
losophy did in Greece % In fact the worst thing about it was 
its over-luxuriance, which needed pruning and repressing. 
But no. The oracles of history, like all others, are two- 
edged. Let them speak as loudly and distinctly as they 
may, they are not to be understood, unless the hearer is 
willing to understand them. Where this will is wanting, a 
person may prefer the barrenness which has surrounded the 
Edinburgh metaphysical chair, to the rich, ever-teeming 
tropic landscape of Greek Philosophy. 

Cherish and foster that spirit of love, which lies wakeful, 
seeking what it may feed on, in every genial young mind : 
supply it with wholesome food : place an object before it 
worthy of its embraces : else it will try to appease its 
cravings by lawless indulgence. What your system may be, 
is of minor importance : in every one, as Leibnitz says, there 
is a sufficiency of truth : the tree must have life in it; or 
it could not stand. But you should plant the tree in the 
open plain, before your pupil’s eyes : do not leave him to 
find out his way amid the windings of a tangled forest: let 
him see it distinctly, by itself; and no matter to what 
highth it may rise, his sight will overtop it; though, when 
it is surrounded by others, he cannot scan its dimensions. 
Plunge as deep as you will into the sea of knowledge ; and 
do not fear his being unable or unwilling to follow you. 
The difficulty itself acts as a spur. For in this respect the 
mind is unlike a sword : it will be sharpened more effectively 
by a rugged rock, than by a whetstone. It springs up 
strongest and loftiest in craggy places, where it has had to 
commune and wage battle with the winds. 

The cautious avoidance of difficult and doubtful points by 
a teacher in a university implies an ignorance of the sus¬ 
ceptibility and subtilty of the youthful mind, whenever its 
feelings go along with its studies. He who is to win the 







GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


435 


race, must not stop short of the goal, or go wide of it, 
through fear of running against it: metafervidis evitata rotis, 
—this will be his aim. Would Columbus have discovered 
America, if he had been merely trained to fair-weather, 
pleasure-boat sailing 1 Could Shakspeare have written Lear 
and Hamlet, if some Scotch metaphysician had “ prepared 
him for exercising his own judgement,” by “ exhibiting an 
outline of the different sciences to him, and suggesting 
subjects for his future examination ? ” Concrete is said to 
be the best foundation for a house; and it is by the 
observation of the concrete, that Nature trains the thinking 
powers of mankind. This her method then, we may be 
sure, will also be the most efficient with individuals. 

Besides, this calling upon the young, at the very moment 
when they are first crossing the threshold of the temple of 
Knowledge, to sit in judgement on all the majestic forms 
that line the approach to its sanctuary, tends to pamper the 
vice, to which the young are especially prone, of an over¬ 
weening, presumptuous vanity. Under judicious guidance 
they may be trained to love and reverence Truth, and all 
her highpriests : but more easily may they be led to despise 
the achievements of former times, and to set up their own 
age, and more especially themselves, as the highest objects 
of their worship. This too must needs be the result, when 
they are taught to give sentence on all the great men of old, 
to regard their own decision as supreme, and to pay homage 
solely to themselves. What will, what must be the produce 
of such a system % Will they not be like the Moralist in 
Wordsworth’s Poet's Epitaph ? who 

has neither eyes nor ears, 

Himself his world, and his own God : 

One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling 
Nor form, nor feeling, great or small, 

A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, 

An intellectual all-in-all. 

U. 


A strong and vivid imagination is scarcely less valuable to 
a philosopher, than to a poet. For the philosopher also 

F F 2 








436 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


needs that the objects of his contemplation should stand in 
their living fulness before him. The first requisite for dis¬ 
cerning the relations and differences of things is to see the 
| things themselves clearly and distinctly. From a want of 
this clear, distinct perception, the bulk of those who busy 
themselves in the construction of philosophical systems, are 
apt to substitute abstractions for realities; and on these 
abstractions they build their card-houses by the aid of 
j logical formules. No wonder that such houses are soon 
I overthrown, nay, that they topple ere long through their own 
| insubstantiality. 

Nevertheless an imaginative philosopher has continual 
I occasion for exercising a more than ordinary selfdistrust. 
Among the manifold aspects of things, there are always 
some which will appear to accord with his prepossessions. 
They will seem in his eyes, under the colouring of these 
| prepossessions, to fit into his scheme, just as though it had 
been made for them. But whenever this is the case, we 
should be especially distrustful of appearances. For a prima I 
■fade view of things cannot be a scientifically or philo¬ 
sophically correct one. It will have more or less of sub¬ 
jective, relative truth, but can never be the truth itself, 
absolutely and objectively. Whatever our position may be, 
it cannot be the centre ; and only from the centre can things 
be seen in their true bearings and relations. Yet, by an 
involuntary delusion, consequent upon our separation and 

estrangement from the real Centre of the .Universe,_the 

Centre that does not abide in any single point, but at every 
point finds a Universe encircling it,—we cannot help as¬ 
suming that we ourselves are that centre, and that the sun 
and moon and stars are merely revolving around us. u. 

Prudens inquisitio dimidium sdentiae. The first step to 
self-knowledge is self-distrust. Nor can we attain to anv 
kind of knowledge, except by a like process. We must fall 
on our knees at the threshold ; or we shall not gain entrance 
into the temple. u. 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


437 


They who are in the habit of passing sentence upon 
books,-—and what ignoramus in our days does not deem 
himself fully qualified for sitting in the seat of the scorner 1 
—are apt to think that they have condemned a work irre¬ 
trievably, when they have pronounced it to be unintelligible. 
Unintelligible to whom ? To themselves, the self-constituted 
judges. So that their sentence presumes their competency 
to pronounce it: and this, to every one save themselves, 
may be exceedingly questionable. 

It is true, the very purpose for which a writer publishes 
his thoughts, is, that his readers should share them with j 
him. Hence the primary requisite of a style is its intel¬ 
ligibleness : that is to say, it must be capable of being 
understood. But intelligibleness is a relative quality, 
varying with the capacity of the reader. The easiest book 
in a language is inaccessible to those who have never set 
foot within the pale of that language. The simplest 
elementary treatise in any science is obscure and perplexing, 
until we become familiar with the terminology of that 
science. Thus every writer is entitled to demand a certain 
amount of knowledge in those for whom he writes, and a 
certain degree of dexterity in using the implements of 
thought. In this respect too there should not only be milk 
for babes, but also strong meat for those who are of full age. 

It is absurd to lay down a rule, that every man’s thoughts 
should move at the self-same pace, the measure of which we 
naturally take from our own. Indeed, if it fatigues us to 
keep up with one who walks faster, and steps out more 
widely than we are wont to do, there may also be an excess 
on the other side, which is more intolerably wearisome. 

Of course a writer, who desires to be popular, will not put 
on seven-league boots, with which he would soon escape out 
of sight. Yet the highest authority has told us, that “ the 
poet’s eye Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to 1 
heaven,” taking the rapidity of vision as a type for that of 
the Imagination, which surely ought not to lag behind the 
fleetest of the senses. In logical processes indeed transitions 
are less sudden. If you wish to bind people with a chain of 










438 


GUESSES AT TEUTH. 


reasoning, you must not skip over too 'many of the links ; or 
they may fail to perceive its cogency. Still it is wholesome 
and bracing for the mind, to have its faculties kept on the 
stretch. It is like the effect of a walk in Switzerland upon 
the body. Reading an Essay of Bacon’s for instance, or a 
chapter of Aristotle or of Butler, if it be well and thought¬ 
fully read, is much like climbing up a hill, and may do one 
the same sort of good. Set the tortoise to run against the 
hare ; and, even if he does not overtake it, he will do more 
than he ever did previously, more than he would ever have 
thought himself capable of doing. Set the hare to run with 
the tortoise : he falls asleep. 

Suppose a person to have studied Xenophon and Thucydides, 
till he has attained to the same thorough comprehension of 
them both; and this is so far from being an unwarrantable 
supposition, that the very difficulties of Thucydides tempt 
and stimulate an intelligent reader to form a more intimate 
acquaintance with him : which of the two will have strength¬ 
ened the student’s mind the most ? from which will he have 
derived the richest and most lasting treasures of thought ? 
Who, that has made friends with Dante, has not had his in¬ 
tellect nerved and expanded by following the pilgrim through 
his triple world ? and would Tasso have done as much for 
him ? The labour itself, which must be spent in order to 
understand Sophocles or Shakspeare, to search out their 
hidden beauties, to trace their labyrinthine movements, to 
dive into their bright, jeweled caverns, and converse with the 
sea-nymphs that dwell there, is its own abundant reward; 
not merely from the enjoyment that accompanies it, but 
because such pleasure, indeed all pleasure that is congenial 
to our better nature, is refreshing and invigorating, like a 
draught of nectar from heaven. In such studies we imitate 
the example of the eagle, unsealing his eyesight by gazing at 
the sun. 

South, in his sixth Sermon, after speaking of the difficulties 
which we have to encounter in the search after truth, urges 
the beneficial effect of those difficulties. “ Truth (he says) 
is a great stronghold, barred and fortified by God and 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


439 


Nature; and diligence is properly the Understanding’s laying 
siege to it; so that, as in a kind of warfare, it must be per¬ 
petually upon the watch, observing all the avenues and passes 
to it, and accordingly makes its approaches. Sometimes it 
thinks it gains a point; and presently again it finds itself 
baffled and beaten off : yet still it renews the onset, attacks 
the difficulty afresh, plants this reasoning, and that argu¬ 
ment, this consequence, and that distinction, like so many 
intellectual batteries, till at length it forces a way and pas¬ 
sage into the obstinate enclosed truth, that so long withstood 
and defied all its assaults. The Jesuits have a saying common 
amongst them, touching the institution of youth, (in which 
their chief strength and talent lies,) that Vexatio dat intel- 
lectum. As when the mind casts and turns itself restlessly 
from one thing to another, strains this power of the soul to 
apprehend, that to judge, another to divide, a fourth to 
remember,—thus tracing out the nice and scarce observable 
difference of some things, and the real agreement of others, 
till at length it brings all the ends of a long and various 
hypothesis together, sees how one part coheres with and 
depends upon another, and so clears off all the appearing 
contrarieties and contradictions, that seemed to lie cross and 
uncouth, and to make the whole unintelligible,—this is the 
laborious and vexatious inquest, that the soul must make 
after science. For Truth, like a stately dame, will not be 
seen, nor shew herself at the first visit, nor match with the 
understanding upon an ordinary courtship or address. Long 
and tedious attendances must be given, and the hardest 
fatigues endured and digested : nor did ever the most preg¬ 
nant wit in the world bring forth anything great, lasting, 
and considerable, without some pain and travail, some pangs 
and throes before the delivery. Now all this that I have 
said is to shew the force of diligence in the investigation of 
truth, and particularly of the noblest of all truths, which is 
that of religion.” 

For my own part, I have ever gained the most profit, and 
the most pleasure also, from the books which have made me 
think the most: and, when the difficulties have once been 








440 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


overcome, these are the books which have struck the deepest 
root, not only in my memory and understanding, but likewise 
in my affections. For this point too should be taken into 
account. We are wont to think slightly of that, which it 
costs us a slight effort to win. When a maiden is too 
forward, her admirer deems it time to draw back. Whereas 
whatever has associated itself with the arousal and activity 
of our better nature, with the important and memorable 
epochs in our lives, whether moral or intellectual, is,—to 
cull a sprig from the beautiful passage in which Wordsworth 
describes the growth of Michael’s love for his native hills,— 

Our living being, even more 
Than our own blood, and,—could it less ?—retains 
Strong hold on our affections, is to us 
A pleasurable feeling of blind love, 

The pleasure which there is in life itself. 

If you would fertilize the mind, the plough must be driven 
over and through it. The gliding of wheels is easier and 
rapider, but only makes it harder and more barren. Above 
all, in the present age of light reading, that is, of reading 
hastily, thoughtlessly, ihdiscriminately, unfruitfully, when 
most books are forgotten as soon as they are finisht, and very 
many sooner, it is well if something heavier is cast now and 
then into the midst of the literary public. This may scare 
and repell the weak : it will rouse and attract the stronger, 
and increase their strength by making them exert it. In 
the sweat of the brow is the mind as well as the body to eat 
its bread. Nil sine magno Musa labore dedit mortalibus. 

Are writers then to be studiously difficult, and to tie knots 
for the mere purpose of compelling their readers to untie 
them? Not so. Let them follow the bent of their own 
minds. Let their style be the faithful mirror of their 
thoughts. Some minds are too rapid and vehement and 
redundant to flow along in lucid transparence ; some have to 
break over rocks, and to force a way through obstacles, which 
would have dammed them in. Tacitus could not write like 
Cesar. Niebuhr could not write like Goldsmith. u. 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


441 


Train the understanding. Take care that the mind has a 
stout and straight stem. Leave the flowers of wit and fancy to 
come of themselves. Sticking them on will not make them 
grow. You can only engraft them, by grafting that which 
will produce them. 

Another rule of good gardening may also be applied with 
advantage to the mind. Thin your fruit in spring, that the 
tree may not be'exhausted, and that some of it may come to 
perfection. u * 

There are some fine passages, I am told, in that book. 

Are there h Then beware of them. Fine passages are 
mostly culs de sacs. For in books also does one see 

Rich windows that exclude the light, 

And passages that lead to nothing. u. 


A writer is the only person who can give more than he 
has. It may be doubted however whether such gifts are not 
mostly in bad money. u. 

Fields of thought seem to need lying fallow. After some 
powerful mind has brought a new one into cultivation, the 
same seed is sown in it over and over again, until the crop 
degenerates, and the land is worn out. Hereupon it is left 
alone, and gains time to recruit, before a subsequent genera¬ 
tion is led, by the exhaustion of the country round, to till it 
afresh. u> 


The ultimate tendency of civilization is toward barbarism. 

The question is not whether a doctrine is beautiful, but 
whether it is true. When we want to go to a place, we don’t 
ask whether the road leads through a pretty country, but 
whether it is the right road, the road pointed out by 
authority, the turnpike-road. 

How poorly must he have profited by the study of Plato, 
who said, Malo cumPlatone errare ,, quam cum istisvera sentire! 
















442 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


A maxim of this kind may indeed serve for those who are 
not ordained to the ministry of Truth. The great bulk of 
mankind must in all things take much for granted, as 
everybody must in many things. They whose calling is to 
act, need to have certain guiding principles of faith to look 
up to, fixt like stars high above the changeful, and often 
storm-rent atmosphere of their cares and doubts and pas¬ 
sions, principles which they may hold to be eternal, from 
their fixedness, and from their light. The philosopher too 
himself must perforce take many things for granted, seeing 
that the capacities of human knowledge are so limited. 
Only his assumptions will be in lower and commoner mat¬ 
ters, with regard to which he will have to receive much on 
trust. For his thoughts dwell among principles. He mounts, 
like the astronomer, into the region of the stars themselves, 
and measures their magnitudes and their distances, and cal¬ 
culates their orbits, and distinguishes the fixt from the 
erring, the solar sources of light from the satellites which 
fill their urns from these everlasting fountains, and distin¬ 
guishes those also, which dutifully preserve their regular, 
beatific courses, from the vagrant emissaries of destruction. 
He must have an entire, implicit faith in the illimitable 
beneficence, that is, in the divinity of Truth. He must 
devoutly believe that God is Truth, and that Truth therefore 
must ever be one wdth God. 

Cicero, I am aware, ascribes that speech ( Tusc . Quaest. i. 
17) to the young man whom he is instructing; a circum¬ 
stance overlookt by those who have tried to confirm them¬ 
selves in their faintheartedness, by pleading his authority for 
believing that a falsehood may be better than Truth. But 
he immediately applauds his pupil, and makes the sentiment 
his own : Made virtute: ego enim ipse cum eodem illo non 
invitus erraverim. It is plain from this sentence, the evidence 
of which might be strengthened by a number of others, that 
what Cicero admired so much in Plato, was not his philo¬ 
sophy. On the contrary, as he himself often forgot the 
thinker in the talker, so, his eye for words having been 
sharpened by continual practice, he was apt to look in others 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


443 


also at the make of the garments their thoughts were arrayed 
in, rather than at the countenance or the body of the 
thoughts themselves. He had told us himself a little 
before : Hanc perfectam philosophiam semper judieavi, quae 
de maximis quaestionibus copiose posset ornateque dicere. Thus 
what he valued most in Plato, was his eloquence ; the true 
unequaled worth of which however is its perfect fitness for 
exhibiting the thoughts it contains, or, so to say, its trans¬ 
parency. For, while in most other writers the thoughts are 
only seen dimly, as in water, where the medium itself is 
visible, and more or less distorts or obscures them, being 
often turbid, often coloured, and often having no little mud 
in it, in Plato one almost looks through the language, as 
through air, discerning the exact form of the objects which 
stand therein, and every part and shade of which is brought 
out by the sunny light resting upon them. Indeed, when 
reading Plato, we hardly think about the beauty of his style, 
or notice it except for its clearness : but, as our having felt 
the sensations of sickness makes us feel and enjoy the sen¬ 
sations of health, so does the acquaintance we are forced to 
contract with all manner of denser and murkier writers, 
render us vividly sensible of the bright daylight of Plato. 
Cicero however might almost have extracted the Beauties of 
Plato, as somebody has extracted the Beauties of ShaJcspeare ; 
which give as good a notion of his unspeakable, exuberant 
beauty, as a pot pourri gives of a flower-garden, or as a lump 
of teeth would give of a beautiful mouth. 

As to Plato’s pure, impartial, searching philosophy, Cicero 
was too full of prejudices to sympathize with it. Philosophy 
was not the bread of life to him, but a medicinal cordial in 
his afflictions. He loved it, not for itself, but for certain 
results which he desired and hoped to gain from it. In 
philosophy he was never more than an Eclectic, that is, in 
point of fact, no philosopher at all. For the very essence of 
the philosophical mind lies in this, that it is constrained by 
an irresistible impulse to ascend to primary, necessary prin¬ 
ciples, and cannot halt until it reaches the living, streaming 
sources of Truth; whereas the Eclectic will stop short where 












444 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


he likes, at any maxim to which he chooses to ascribe the 
authority of a principle. The philosophical mind must be 
systematic, ever seeking to behold all things in their con¬ 
nexion, as parts or members of a great organic whole, and 
impregnating them all with the electric spirit of order; 
while the Eclectic is content if he can string together a 
number of generalizations. A Philosopher incorporates and 
animates ; an Eclectic heaps and ties up. The Philosopher 
combines multiplicity into unity ; the Eclectic leaves unity 
straggling about in multiplicity. The former opens the 
arteries of Truth, the latter its veins. Cicero’s legal habits 
peer out from under his philosophical cloak, in his constant 
appeal to precedent, his ready deference to authority. For 
in law, as in other things, the practitioner does not go 
beyond maxims, that is, secondary or tertiary principles, 
taking his stand upon the mounds which his predecessors 
have erected. 

Cicero was indeed led by his admiration of Plato to adopt 
the form of the dialogue for his own treatises, of all forms 
the best fitted for setting forth philosophical truths in their 
free expansion and intercommunion, as well as in their 
I distinctness and precision, without chaining up Truth, and 
making her run round and round in the mill of a partial 
and narrow system. But he has nothing of the dialectic 
spirit. His collocutors do not wrestle with one another, as 
they did in the intellectual gymnasia of the Greeks. After 
some preliminary remarks, and the interchange of a few 
compliments characterized by that urbanity in which no 
man surpasses him, he throws off the constraint of logical 
analysis; and his speakers sit down by turns in the portico, 
and deliver their didactic harangues, just as in a bad play 
the personages tell you their story at length, and of course 
each to his own advantage. You must not interrupt them 
with a question for the world \ you would be sure to put 
them out. 

But if the love of Plato is a worthless ground for pre¬ 
ferring errour to truth, still more reprehensible is it to go 
wrong out of hatred or contempt for any one, be he who he 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


445 


may. Could the Father of lies speak truth, it would be our 
duty to believe him when he did so. u. 

In the preface to Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound , there is a 
sentence, which at first thought may remind us of Cicero’s 
saying about Plato, and may seem analogous to it, but 
which, when more closely examined, we perceive to be its 
diametrical opposite. That unhappy enthusiast, who, through 
a calamitous combination of circumstances, galling and 
fretting a morbidly sensitive temperament, became a fana¬ 
tical hater of the perversions and distortions conjured up by 
his own feverish imagination, there says : “For my part I 
had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, than go 
to heaven with Paley and Malthus.” Here however, if we 
look away from the profaneness of the expressions, the 
meaning is grand and noble. Such is the author’s faith in 
truth and goodness, and his love for them, he would rather 
incur everlasting misery by cleaving to them, than enjoy 
everlasting happiness, if it could only be won by sacrificing 
his reason and conscience to falsehood and coldhearted 
worldliness. Thus this sentence at bottom is only tanta¬ 
mount to that most magnanimous saying of antiquity, Fiat 
justitia, ruat coelum : which does not mean, that the fulfil¬ 
ment of Justice would be the knell of the Universe, but that, 
even though this were to be the consequence, even though 
the world were to go to rack, Justice must and ought to be 
fulfilled. The mind which had not been taught how Mercy 
and Truth, Righteousness and Peace were to meet together 
and to be reconciled for ever in the Divine Atonement, 
could not mount to a sublimer anticipation of the blessed 
declaration, that Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but the 
word of God shall not pass away. 

At the same time Shelley’s words exhibit the miserable 
delusion he was under, and shew how what he hated, under 
the name of Christianity, was not Christianity itself, but 
rather a medley of antichristian notions, which he blindly 
identified with it, from finding them associated with it in 
vulgar opinion. _ u * 















446 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


The name Eclectic is often misused nowadays, by being 
applied to such as will not surrender their reason and con¬ 
science to the yoke of a dogmatical system, anathematizing 
everything beyond its pale,—to those who, recognizing the 
infinite fulness and plastic life of Truth, delight to trace it 
out under all its manifestations, and to acknowledge that, 
amid the numberless errours and perversions and exaggera¬ 
tions with which it has been mixt up, it has still been the 
one source of a living power in every mode of human 
opinion. Thus I have seen the name assigned to Neander, 
and to other writers no less alien from the Eclectic spirit. 
This however is mere ignorance and confusion. 

The Eclectic is a person who picks out certain proposi¬ 
tions, such as strike his fancy or his moral sense, and seem 
edifying or useful, from divers systems of philosophy, and 
strings or patches them together, without troubling himself 
much about their organic unity or coherence. When the 
true philosophical spirit, which everywhere seeks after 
unity, under the conviction that the universe must reflect 
the oneness of the contemplating as well as of the Creative 
Mind, was waning away, dilettanti philosophers, who were 
fond of dabbling in the records of prior speculations, arose 
both among the Greeks and at Rome : and of these, 
Diogenes Laertius tells us (i. §. 21), Potamo of Alexandria 
introduced s<\€KTiKr]v aipeaiv, ck\ e£apevos ra dpeaavra eKatrrr79 
twv alpeaeoiv. That is to say, he may have been the first to 
assume the name; but the spirit which led him to do so 
was already wisely diffused. Indeed little else in the way of 
philosophy gained much favour, from his days, at the 
beginning of the Roman empire, down to the first coming 
forward of the Schoolmen. 

This procedure may best be illustrated by the wellknown 
story of Zeuxis, who took the most beautiful features and 
members of several beautiful women to make a more 
beautiful one than any in his Helen. In fact this story is 
related by Cicero at the beginning of the second Book of 
his work Be Inventione , with the view of justifying his 
own design of writing a treatise, in which, he says, “ Non 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


447 


unum aliquod proposuimus exemplum, cnjus omnes partes, 
quocumque essent in genere, exprimendae nobis necessario 
viderentur; sed, omnibus unum in locum coactis scrip- 
toribus, quod quisque commodissime praecipere videbatur, 
excerpsimus, et ex variis ingeniis excellentissima quaeque 
libavimus.” He adds that, if his skill were equal to that of 
the painter, his work ought to be still better, inasmuch as he 
had a larger stock of models to choose from : “ Ille una ex 
urbe, et ex eo numero virginum, quae turn erant, eligere 
potuit : nobis omnium, quicumque fuerunt, ab ultimo 
principio hujus praeceptionis usque ad hoc tempus, expositis 
copiis, quodcumque placeret eligendi potestas fuit.” That 
such a process, though the genius of Zeuxis may have 
corrected its evils, is not the right one for the production of 
a great work of art,—that a statue or picture ought not to 
be a piece of patchwork, or a posy of multifarious beauties, 
—that it must spring from an idea in the mind of the 
artist, as is exprest by Raphael in the passage quoted 
above (p. 265), will now be generally acknowledged by the 
intelligent; though it continually happens that clever young 
men, such as Cicero then was, fancy they shall dazzle the 
sun, by bringing together a lamp from this quarter and that, 
with a dozen candles from others. Cicero himself, in his 
later writings on the same subject, followed a wiser course, 
and drew from the rich stores of his own experience and 
knowledge. But how congenial the other practice was to 
the age, is proved by Dionysius, who sets up the same story 
of Zeuxis, in the introduction to his Judgement on Ancient 
Writers , as an example it behoves us to follow, kcu ttjs eneivoov 
■yfrvxTj? an(w6i£e<T0ai to Kpelrrov. 

On the other hand they who are gifted with a true philo¬ 
sophical spirit, who feel the weight of the mystery of the 
universe, on whom it presses like a burthen, and will not let 
them rest, who are constrained by an inward necessity to 
solve the problems it presents to their age, will naturally 
have much sympathy with those in former ages who have 
been impelled by the same necessity to attempt the solution 
of similar problems. They will, or at all events ought to 








443 


GKJES3ES AT TRUTH. 


regard them as fellow-workers, as brothers. The problems 
which occupied former ages, were only different phases of the 
same great problem, by which they themselves are spell¬ 
bound. Whatever there was of truth in the solutions devised 
of yore, must still retain its character of truth, though it 
will have become partial, and can no longer be regarded as 
absolute. As in Science the later, more perfect systems 
incorporate all the truths ascertained by previous discoveries, 
nay, take these truths as the materials for further researches, 
so must it also be, under certain modifications, in Philosophy. 
Hence to call a philosopher an Eclectic on this account is a 
mere misapprehension of the name, and of the laws 'which 
govern the development of the human mind. It is just as 
absurd, as it would be to call Laplace and Herschel Eclectics, 
because their speculations recognize and incorporate the 
results of the discoveries of Newton and Kepler and Galileo 
and Copernicus, nay, of Hipparchus and Ptolemy, so far as 
there was truth in them. 

On this topic there is a remarkable passage in the 12th 
Chapter of Coleridge’s JBiographia Literaria, where the 
author says that the doctrines of Leibnitz, “ as hitherto inter¬ 
preted, have not produced the effect, which Leibnitz himself, 
in a most instructive passage, describes as the criterion of a true 
philosophy, namely, that it would at once explain and collect 
the fragments of truth scattered through systems apparently 
the most incongruous. The truth, says he, is diffused more 
widely than is commonly believed; but it is often painted, 
yet oftener maskt, and is sometimes mutilated, and some¬ 
times, alas, in close alliance with mischievous errours. The 
deeper however we penetrate into the ground of things, the 
more truth we discover in the doctrines of the greater 
number of the philosophical sects. The want of substantial 
reality in the objects of the senses, according to the Sceptics, 
—the harmonies or numbers, the prototypes and ideas, to 
which the Pythagoreans and Platonists reduced all things,— 
the ONE and ALL of Parmenides and Plotinus, without 
Spinozism,—the necessary connexion of things according to 
the Stoics, reconcilable with the spontaneity of the other 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


449 


schools,—the vital philosophy of the Cabbalists and 
Hermetists, who assumed the universality of sensation,—the 
substantial forms and entelechies of Aristotle and the School¬ 
men,—together with the mechanical solution of all particular 
phenomena according to Democritus and the recent philoso¬ 
phers,—all these we shall find united in one perspective 
central point, which shews regularity and a coincidence of all 
the parts in the very object, which from every other point of 
view must appear confused and distorted. The spirit of 
sectarianism has been hitherto our fault, and the cause of our 
failures. We have imprisoned our own conceptions by the 
lines which we have drawn in order to exclude the concep¬ 
tions of others.” 

The observations of Leibnitz here referred to are so 
interesting,—both as an expression of his own genius, which 
was always seeking after harmony and unity, and as the 
anticipation of a truth which was to come out more distinctly 
in the subsequent expansion of philosophy, but which had to 
lie dormant for nearly a century after he uttered it, and 
which even now is recognized by few beyond the limits of the 
country where it was uttered,—that I will quote what he 
says on the subject. It occurs in his first letter to Remond 
de Montmort, written in 1714, not long before the close of 
his long life of meditation, and is also pleasing as a record of 
the growth of his own mind. “ J’ai t4che de de'terrer et de 
reunir la verite ensevelie et dissip^e sous les opinions des 
differentes sectes des Philosophes ; et je crois y avoir ajoute 
quelque chose du mien pour faire quelques pas en avant. 
Les occasions de mes etudes des ma premiere jeunesse, m’y 
ont donne de la facilite. Etant enfant j’appris Aristote ; et 
meme les Scholastiques ne me rebuterent point; et je n’en 
suis point fache presentement. Mais Platon aussi des lors, 
avec Plotin, me donnerent quelque contentement, sans parler 
d’autres anciens, que je consultai. Par apres etant emancipe 
des ecoles triviales, je tombai sur les Modernes; et je me 
souviens que je me promenai seul dans un bocage aupres de 
Leipsic, appelle le Rosendal, a l’age de quinze ans, pour 
deliberer si je garderois les Formes substantielles. Enfin le 






450 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Mecanisme prevalut, et me porta a m’appliquer aux Mathe- 
matiques. II est vrai que je n’entrai dans les pins profondes, 
qu’apres avoir converse avec M. Huygens a Paris. Mais 
quand je cherchai les dernieres raisons du Mecanisme, et des 
loix meme dn monvement, je fus tout surpris de voir qu’il 
etait impossible de les trouver dans les Mathematiques, et 
qu’il falloit retourner a la Metaphysique. C’est ce qui me 
ramena aux Entelechies, et du materiel au formel, et me fit 
enfin comprendre, apres plusieurs corrections et avancemens 
de mes notions, que les monades, ou les substances simples, 
sont les seules veritables substances; et que les choses 
materielles ne sont que des phenomenes, mais bien fondes et 
bien lies. C’est de quoi Platon, et meme les Acade'miciens 
posterieurs, et encore les Sceptiques, ont entrevu quelque 
chose ; mais ces messieurs, apres Platon, n’en ont pas si bien 
use que lui. J’ai trouve que le plupart des Sectes ont raison 
dans une bonne partie de ce qu’elles avancent, mais non pas 
tant en ce qu’elles nient. Les Formalistes, comme les 
Platoniciens, et les Aristoteliciens, ont raison de chercher la 
source des choses dans les causes finales et formelles. Mais 
ils ont tort de negliger les efficientes et les materielles, et d’en 
inferer, comme faisoit M. Henri Morus en Angleterre, et 
quelques autres Platoniciens, qu’il y a des phenomenes qui 
ne peuvent etre expliques mecaniquement. Mais de 1’autre 
cote les Materialistes, ou ceux qui s’attachent uniquement a 
| la Philosophie mecanique, ont tort de rejetter les considera¬ 
tions m6taphysiques, et de vouloir tout expliquer par ce qui 
depend de l’imagination. Je me flatte d’avoir penetre 
l’Harmonie des differens regnes, et d’avoir vu que les deux 
parties ont raison, pourvu qn’ils ne se choquent point; que 
tout se fait mecaniquement et metaphysiquement en meme 
temps dans les phenomenes de la nature, mais que la source 
de la mecanique est dans la metaphysique. II n’etoit pas 
aise de decouvrir ce mystere, parce qu’il y a peu de gens qui 
se donnent la peine de joindre ces deux sortes d’etudes.” 
Yol. v. pp. 8, 9. Ed. Dutens. 

In his third Letter to Bemond, Leibnitz recurs to the same 
subject. “ Si j’en avois le loisir, je comparerois mes dogmes 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


451 


avec ceux des Anciens et d’autres habiles hommes. La verite 
est plus repandue qu’on ne pense ; mais elle est tres souvent 
fardee, et tres souvent aussi enveloppee, et meme affoiblie, 
mutilee, corrompue par des additions qui la gatent, ou la 
rendent moins utile. En faisant remarquer ces traces de la 
verite dans les Anciens, ou, pour parler plus generalement, dans 
les anterieurs, on tireroit l’or de la boue, le diamant de sa mine, 
et la lumiere des tenebres; et ce seroit en effet perennis quaedam 
Philosophia. On peut meme dire, qu’on y remarqueroit 
quelque progres dans les connoissances. Les Orientaux ont 
de belles et de grandes idees de la Divinite. Les Grecs y ont 
ajoute le raisonnement et une forme de science. Les Peres de 
l’Eglise ont rejette ce qu’il y avoit de mauvais dans la Philo¬ 
sophic des Grecs; mais les Scholastiques ont tache d’em¬ 
ployer utilement pour le Christianisme, ce qu’il y avoit de 
passable dans la Philosophic des Payens. J’ai dit souvent 
aurum latere in stercore illo scholastico barbariei; et je 
souhaiterois qu’on put trouver quelque habile homme verse 
dans cette Philosophic Hibernoise et Espagnole, qui eut de 
l’inclination et de la capacite pour en tirer le bon. Je suis 
sur qu’il trouveroit sa peine payee par plusieurs belles et im- 
portantes verites.” p. 13. 

That Philosophy, in the last sixty years, has been 
advancing at no slow pace toward the grand goal, which 
Leibnitz descried from afar, by a Pisgah view of the land he 
himself was not destined to enter, will not be questioned by 
any one acquainted with the recent philosophers of Germany. 
One of the clearest proofs German Philosophy has exhibited 
of its being on the road toward the truth, has lain in this 
very fact, that it has been enabled to appreciate the philoso¬ 
phical systems of former ages, as they had never been 
appreciated previously. If we look, for instance, into Dugald 
Stewart’s Historical Essay, we find no attempt even to do 
anything of the sort. As I have said above (p. 332), he 
merely selects a few remarks or maxims from the writings 
of preceding philosophers, such as at all resemble the observa¬ 
tions of his own philosophy, or the received maxims of his 
own age, and takes no thought about anything else, nor even 


G G 2 








452 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


i about the coherence of these remarks with the rest of the 
j systems they belong to. On the other hand, if we turn to 
Ritter’s History of Philosophy, or to Hegel’s Lectures,—to 
S mention two of the chief examples of what has been repeated 
in many others,—we see them endeavouring to estimate all 
| prior systems according to their historical position in the 
j progressive development of human thought, to shew what 
truths it was the especial province of each to bring out, and 
j how each fulfilled its appointed work. In England this 
| method has been applied to the history of Science by Dr 
| Whewell, to that of Philosophy in the History of Moral 
j Philosophy publisht in the Encyclopedia Metropolitana. 

How that this historical, genetical method of viewing prior 
systems of philosophy is something totally different from 
Eclecticism, nay, is the direct opposite to it, will not need 
further proof. But it is termed conceited and presumptuous, 
i to pretend to know better than all the wisest men of former 
times, and to sit in judgement upon them. This however is 
sheer nonsense. Conceit and presumption may indeed shew 
themselves in this, as in every other mode of uttering our 
thoughts : but there can hardly be a better corrective for 
those evil tendencies, than the attentive, scrutinizing con¬ 
templation of the great men of former times, with the view 
of ascertaining the amount of the truth they were allowed to 
discern, the power of the impulse they gave to the progress 
of the human mind. If we know more in some respects than 
they did, this itself is a ground of gratitude to them through 
whose labours we have gained this advantage, and of rever¬ 
ence for those who with such inferior means achieved so 
much. It is no way derogatory to Newton, or Kepler, or 
Galileo, that Science in these days should have advanced far 
beyond them. Rather is this itself their crown of glory. 
Their works are still bearing fruit, and will continue to do 
so. The truths which they discovered are still living in our 
knowledge, pregnant with infinite consequences. Nor will 
any one be so ready and able to do them justice, as he who 
has carefully examined what they actually accomplisht for 
the advancement of Science. So too will it be with regard 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 453 

to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, to Anselm and Bacon 
and Leibnitz. The better we know and appreciate what they 
did, the humbler it must needs make us. Nay the very 
process of endeavouring faithfully and carefully to enter into 
the minds of others, as it can only be effected by passing out 
of ourselves, out of our habitual prepossessions and predilec¬ 
tions, is a discipline both of love and of humility. In this 
respect at all events there can be no comparison between such 
a Philosophy, and an exclusive dogmatical system, which 
peremptorily condemns whatever does not coincide with it. 

Of course this profounder Philosophy, which aims at tracing 
the philosophical idea through its successive manifestations, 
is not exempt from the dangers which encompass every other 
form of Knowledge, especially from that which is exprest by 
the separation between the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree 
of Life. My dear friend, Sterling, says, in one of his letters 
(p. xxxviii.) : “Cousin makes it the peculiar glory of our 
epoch, that it endeavours to comprehend the mind of all 
other ages. But I fear it must be the tendency of his 
philosophy, while it examines what all other philosophies 
were, to prevent us from being anything ourselves.—We 
must live, not only for the past, but also for the present. 
Herein is the great merit of Coleridge : and I confess for 
myself, I would rather be a believing Jew or Pagan, than a 
man who sees through all religions, but looks not with the 
eyes of any.” How far this censure may apply to Cousin, 
we need not enquire; but there seems no reason why it 
should attach to that form of Philosophy, of which we have 
been speaking, more than to any other. In all speculation, 
of whatsoever kind, there is a centrifugal tendency, which 
requires to be continually counteracted and kept in check. 
This vrould appear to have been the peculiar work of 
Socrates in Greek philosophy, as it had been previously of 
Pythagoras, and as it was that of Bacon in Science. But, 
though the Tree of Knowledge is not the Tree of Life, the 
Tree, or rather the scrubby underwood of Ignorance is quite 
as far removed from it: nor shall we turn the Tree of Know¬ 
ledge into it, by lopping off its expanding, sheltering branches, 



454 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


which spread out on every side, and converting it into a 
Maypole. _ u * 

There are a number of points, with regard to which we 
understand the ancients better than they understood them¬ 
selves. 

Does this seem strange h Mount a hill : will you not 
descry the outlines and bearings of the vallies or plains at its 
feet, more clearly than they who are living in the midst of 
them % That which was positive among the ancients, their 
own feelings, the direct power which their religion, their 
political and social institutions, their literature, their art 
exercised upon them, they undoubtedly understood far better 
than we can hope to do. But the relations in which they 
stand to other nations, and to the general idea of human 
nature, the particular phase of that idea which was mani¬ 
fested in them, the place which they occupy in the pro¬ 
gressive history of mankind,—and in like manner the 
connexion between their language, their institutions, their 
modes of thought, their form of religion, of literature, of 
philosophy, of art, and those of other nations, anterior, con¬ 
temporaneous, or subsequent,—of all these things we have 
far better means of judging, than they could possibly have. 
Thus they were more familiar with their own country, with 
its mountains and dells and glens, its brooks and tarns, than 
any foreiner can be : yet we have a clearer view of its 
geographical position with reference to the rest of the earth. 

Moreover such a general comparative survey will enable us 
to adjust the proportions of many things, which, in the eyes 
of persons living in the midst of them, would be exaggerated 
by propinquity, or coloured and distorted by occasional feel¬ 
ings. In fact the postulate of Archimedes is no less indis¬ 
pensable for knowledge. To comprehend a thing thoroughly 
we need a standing-place out of it. 

Such a ttov o-rco has been supplied for us all by Christianity. 
Therefore Christian Philosophy and Christian Science have 
an incalculable advantage of position over every other form 
of knowledge. u. 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


455 


It might be allowable for a heathen to say of himself, with 
somewhat of selfcomplacency, that he was Nullius addictus 
mrare in verba magistri. As a body, when it is losing its 
unity, and resolving into its parts, is fast crumbling into 
nothingness, and as an ochlocracy is no more than a noisy 
prelude to anarchy, so is Polytheism to Atheism. Whenever 
we find a real religious feeling in any ancient writer, we may 
also discern a dim, though perhaps scarcely conscious recogni¬ 
tion of Unity, of one supreme Deity, behind and above all 
the rest, who permits the gods of Olympus to play round his 
feet, smiling on their sports, or, if they become too wanton 
and boisterous, checking them with a frown. For any moral 
influence on its votaries, the worship of many gods is scarcely 
more powerful than no worship at all. 

besides it was the misfortune of Roman literature, that, 
as h that of the French, there was in it 

No single volume paramount, no code, 

No master spirit, no determined road. 

Such must needs be wanting, where political or social interests 
predominate over those which are more purely intellectual. 
N either Poetry, nor Philosophy will thrive, when anything is 
standing by to overshadow them. They lose their dignity, 
and cannot walk freely as the handmaids of any other queen 
than Religion. The Greeks, on the other hand, had such a 
“ volume paramount,” a volume as to which their greatest 
poets might boast that their works were merely fragments 
from its inexhaustible banquet. Whereas the Romans had 
nothing, with regard to which they could enjoy the comfort¬ 
able feeling, that they might cut and cut and come again. 
Their dishes, like those of our neighbours, were kickshaws, 
which, having already been hasht up a second time, were 
drained of their juices, and unfit for further use. If any of 
them became a standing dish, it was only, like artificial fruit, 
to be lookt at. 

This want of a nest-egg is a calamity which no people can 
get the better of. There is scarcely any blessing so precious 
for the mind of a nation, as the possession of such a great 







456 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


national heirloom, a work loved by all, revered by all, fami¬ 
liar to all, from which all classes for generation after genera¬ 
tion draw their views of Nature and of Life, which thus forms 
a great bond of intellectual and moral sympathy amongst 
all, in which all ranks may meet, as in a church, and all may 
feel at home. How fortunate then are we in England, inas¬ 
much as,—over and above that which, wherever it has not 
been withdrawn from the people by a shortsighted, narrow¬ 
minded, selfseeking policy, is the “Volume Paramount,” and 
the bond of union for all Christendom,—we have also the 
richest Eldorado of thought that man ever opened to man 
in the gold and diamond-mines of Shakspeare ! Paradise 
Lost too may claim to be rankt as one of our volumes para¬ 
mount, of our truly national works, which have mingled with 
the life-blood of the people. Indeed Erskine, I have been 
told, used to say, that, in addressing juries, he had fouid, 
there were three books, and only three, which he could 
always quote with effect, Shakspeare, Milton, and the Bible. 

Moreover Horace’s boast was the simple, naked utteran?e 
of that Eclectic spirit, which I have been speaking of as 
i characterizing his age, and which is always sure to prevail 
among such as are especially termed men of the world. Noi 
was it a less apt expression of his own personal character. \ 
For he was the prototype, and hence has ever been the 
favorite, of wits and fine gentlemen, of those who count it a 
point of goodbreeding to seem pleased with everything, yet 
not to be strongly affected by anything, nil admirari. As 
the chief fear of such persons is, lest they should dishonour 
their breeding by betraying too strong feelings on any 
matter, Horace’s declaration just meets their wishes. The 
pleasantest of dilettanti, he could add, Quo me cunque rapit 
tempestas, deferor hospes, without any regret at the thought 
that everywhere he was a hospes , that nowhere had he a 
home. Chance was to him a more acceptable guide than 
any master ; and he drifted along before the wind and tide, 
rejoicing that he had no pole-star to steer by. 

In him, I say, such a boast might be excusable. But for 
a Christian moralist to take these lines as his motto seems 







GUESSES AT TRUTH. 457 

strangely inappropriate. For we Christians are far happier 
than the poor guideless Heathens. We have a Master ; and 
we know that His words are always true, and that they will 
be true eternally. Above all, for Johnson to make such a 
parade of masterlessness, as he does by prefixing these lines 
to the Rambler ! for Johnson, who, whatever want of defer¬ 
ence he might shew toward other masters, had one master 
ever close at his elbow, to whose words he was always ready 
to swear, a master too who never scrupled to try his patience 
by all sorts of wayward commands,—even himself, his own 
whims, his own caprices, his own imperious wilfulness. In 
fact this is usually the case with those who plume themselves 
on their unwillingness to bear the yoke of any authority. 
They are mostly the slaves of a despot, and therefore spurn 
the notion of being the subjects of a law. They have a 
Puck within their breasts, who is ever leading them “ up and 
down, up and down and, as he is “ feared in field and 
town,” both in town and field they stand alone. Or else he 
“ drops his liquour in their eyesand then the next thing 
they look upon, “ Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull, Or 
meddling monkey, or on busy ape, They will pursue it with 
the soul of love.” Hence, though it is very true that John¬ 
son was Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri, —except 
indeed to his own words,—it was hardly becoming to make 
this state of sheer negativeness a matter of boast. If one 
is to boast at all, it should be grounded on something positive, 
on something implying an act of the reasonable will, not on 
our being carried quocunque rapit tempestas , which can only 
land us in the Limbo of Vanities. 

Will it be deemed a piece of captiousness, if I go on to 
object, as others have done before, to the title of the Rambler ? 
But that too seems to have little appropriateness for a person 
who seldom rambled further than from one side of his arm¬ 
chair to the other, from one cell in his brain to another. 
His reading is indeed said to have been always very desultory; 
so that one of his biographers thinks it questionable, whether 
he ever read any book entirely through, except the Bible. 
If this was indeed the fact, it would form the best intellectual 



458 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


apology for his criticisms. At all events his habit arose from 
that peculiarity which marks all his writings, as well as all 
the anecdotes of him, his incapacity for going out of himself, 
and entering into the minds of others, his inability to under¬ 
stand and sympathize with any form of human nature except 
his own. He only lookt into a book to contemplate his own 
image in it; and when anything came across that image, he 
turned to another volume. This is not rambling, but staying 
at home, in a home which is no home, inasmuch as a home 
must have some one beside oneself to endear and con¬ 
secrate it. 

By some it may be thought that the misnomer of the 
Rambler receives a kind of justification from the circuitous¬ 
ness of the author’s style. This however is not rambling : 
it would be livelier, if it were. It merely rolls round, like 
the sails of a mill, ponderously and sonorously and monoto¬ 
nously, yet seldom grinding any com. In truth it would 
seem constructed for the purpose of going round a thing, 
and round it, and round it, without ever getting to it. His 
sentences might be compared to the hoops worn by ladies in 
those days, and were almost equally successful in disguising 
and disfiguring the form, as well as in keeping you at a 
distance from it. In reading them one may often be puzzled 
to think how they could proceed from a man whose words in 
conversation were so close and sinewy. But Johnson’s 
strength, as well as his weakness, lay in his will; and in 
conversation, when an object that irritated him stood before 
him, his words came down upon it, more like blows, than 
words. In reasoning on the other hand, in that which 
requires meditation or imagination, the will has little power, 
except so far as it has been exercised continuously in the 
formation and cultivation of the mind. A man cannot by a 
! momentary act of the will endow himself with faculties and 
knowledge, which he does not possess already; though he 
! can make himself pour out words, the bigness of which shall 
stand in lieu of force, and their multitude in lieu of meaning. 
How such a style could gain the admiration which Johnson’s 
gained, in an age when numbers of men and women wrote 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 459 

incomparably better, would be another grave puzzle, unless 
one remembered that it was the age when hoops and toupees 
were thought to highten the beauty of women, and full- 
bottomed wigs the dignity of men. He who saw in his glass 
how his wig became his face and head, might easily infer 
that a similar full-bottomed, well-curled friz of words would 
be no less becoming to his thoughts. Nor did he miscalculate 
the effect upon his immediate readers. They who admired 
the hairy wig, were in raptures with the wordy one. u. 

Young men are perpetually told that the first of duties is 
to render oneself independent. But the phrase, unless it 
mean that the first of duties is to avoid hanging, is unhappily 
chosen ; saying what it ought not to say, and leaving unsaid 
what it ought to say. 

It is true, that, in a certain sense, the first of duties is to 
become free ; because Freedom is the antecedent condition 
for the fulfilment of every other duty, the only element in 
which a reasonable soul can exist. Until the umbilical chord 
is severed, the child can hardly be said to have a separate 
life. So long as the heart and mind continue in slavery, it 
is impossible for a man to offer up a voluntary and reasonable 
sacrifice of himself. Now in slavery, since the Fall, we are 
all bom ; from which slavery we have to emancipate our¬ 
selves by some act of our own, halfconscious, it may be, or 
almost unconscious. By some act of our own, I say; not 
indeed unassisted; for every parent, every friend, every 
teacher is a minister ordained to help us in this act. But, 
though we cannot by our own act lift ourselves out of the 
pit, we must by an act of our own take hold of the hand 
which offers to lift us out of it. The same thing is implied 
in every act of duty ; which can only be an act of duty, so 
far as it is the act of a free, voluntary agent. Moreover, if 
we ascend in the scale of duties, we must also ascend in the 
scale of freedom. A person must have cast off the tyrannous 
yoke of the flesh, of its frailties and its lusts, before he can 
become the faithful servant of his country and his God. 

Hence we perceive that the true motive for our striving to 




460 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


set ourselves free is, to manifest our freedom by resigning it, 
through an act to be renewed every moment, ever resuming 
and ever resigning it; to the end that our service may be 
entire, that the service of the hands may likewise be the 
service of the will; even as the Apostle, being free from all, 
made himself servant to all. This is the accomplishment of 
the great Christian paradox, Whosoever will be great, let him 
be a minister ; and whosoever will be chief, let him be a servant. 

Nothing can be more thoroughly opposed to the sublime 
humility of this precept, than the maxim which enjoins inde¬ 
pendence. At best Independence is a negative abstraction, 
and has merely assumed the specious semblance of reality, 
amid the multitude of indistinct, insubstantial words, which 
have been driven across our language from forein regions ; 
whereas Freedom is something positive. So far as our 
dictionaries, which in such matters are by no means safe 
guides, may be relied on, the word independence, in its modern 
acceptation, can hardly have come into use till after the 
Revolution. The earliest instance of it cited is from Pope, 
but is such as shews it must already have been a familiar 
expression. Nor is it ill suited to that age of superficial, 
disjointed, unconnected thought, w T hen the work of cutting 
off the present from the past began, and people first took it 
into their heads, that the mass of evil in the world was the 
result, not of their own follies and vices, but of what their 
ancestors had done and establisht. That such an unscriptural 
word should not occur in our Bible, is not surprising : for 
Independence, as an attribute of man, if it be traced to its 
root, is a kind of synonym for irreligion. Nor, I believe, is 
it to be found in this sense in any writer of the ages when 
men were trained by the discipline of logic to think more 
closely and speak more precisely. Primarily however the 
word seems to have come from the Latinity of the School¬ 
men,—for the Romans never acknowledged either the w r ord 
or the thing signified by it,—and to have been coined, like 
other similar terms, for the sake of expressing one of those 
negations, out of which Philosophy compounds her idea of 
God ; hereby confessing her inability to attain to a positive 






GUESSES AT TRUTH. 461 

idea. Thus, in Baxter’s Methodus Theologiae Christianae, 
God is said to be, with reference to causation, Noncausatus , 
Independent. In his Reasons of the Christian Religion , he 
says : “ The first universal matter is not an uncaused, inde¬ 
pendent being. If such there be, its inactivity and passive¬ 
ness sheweth it to want the excellency of independency 
Jackson (B. vi. c. 3) speaks of philosophers, who “allot a 
kind of independent being to immaterial substances.” In 
Minshew’s Guide into the Tongues (1625), Independence is 
explained by Absoluteness of oneself without dependence cm 
another , which points to a like usage as already existing. 

In this sense Segneri writes : Vindependenza e un tesoro 
inalienabile di Dio solo. When thus used, the word expresses 
an attribute which belongs exclusively to the Deity, in the 
only way in which our intellect can express it, by a negation 
of its opposite. But, when applied to man, it directly 
contravenes the first and supreme laws of our nature, the 
very essence of which is universal dependence upon God, and 
universal inter-dependence on one another. Hence Leighton, 
speaking of disobedience, says (Serm. xv): “ This is still the 
treasonable pride or independency , and wickedness of our 
nature, rising up against God who formed us of nothing.” 
With this our rightful state Freedom is not irreconcilable : 
indeed, if our dependence is to be reasonable and voluntary, 
Freedom, as I have already said, is indispensable to it. 
Accordingly Shakspeare, in his Measure for Measure (Act iv. 
sc. 3), has combined the two words: the Provost there 
replies to the Duke, I am your free dependent; where free 
signifies voluntary, willing. Now in a somewhat different 
sense we ought all to be free dependents. But nobody can be 
an independent dependent. As applied to man, independent 
can only have a relative sense, signifying that he is free from 
certain kinds of dependence. In this sense Cudworth often 
speaks of the heathen belief in several independent gods, that 
is, not absolutely, in the signification exemplified above, but 
independent of each other. In this sense too the name was 
assumed by the religious sect who intended thereby both to 
express their rejection of all previously establisht authority, 








462 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


and their notion that every particular congregation ought to 
be insulated and independent of all others. So again the 
American war was not to assert the Freedom, but the Inde¬ 
pendence of America. Thus things came to such a pass, that 
Smollett wrote an ode to Independence, calling it, or her, or 
him, “Lord of the lion heart and eagle eye.” Nay, even 
Wordsworth, in one of his early poems, after describing the 
scenery round the Lake of Lucerne, wrote : “Even here 
Content has fixed her smiling reign, With Independence, 
child of high Disdain,” a line scarcely less objectionable in 
point of taste, than as glorifying the child of such a parent. 

Moreover Freedom is susceptible of degrees, according to 
the capacity for Freedom in the person who attains to it. 
There is one Freedom in the peasant, who is unable to read, 
and whose time is wellnigh engrost by bodily labour, but 
who humbly reveres the holy words proclaimed to him on 
his one day of weekly rest; and there is another Freedom in 
the poet, or philosopher, or statesman, or prince, who, with 
a full consciousness of the sacrifice he is making, well 
knowing what he is giving up and why, and feeling the 
strength of the reluctances he has to combat and overpower, 
increast as it is by the increast means of gratifying and 
pampering them, still in singleness of heart devotes all his 
faculties to the service of God in the various ministries of 
goodwill toward men. There is one Freedom in the maiden, 
who in her innocence scarcely knows of sin, either its allure¬ 
ments or its perils, and whose life glides along gently and 
transparently amid flowers and beneath shade ; and another 
Freedom in the man, the stream of whose life must flow 
through the haunts of his fellow-creatures, and must receive 
the pollution of cities into it, and must become muddy if it 
be turbulent, and can only preserve its purity by its majestic 
calmness and might. There was one Freedom in Ismene, 
and a higher and nobler in Antigone. There was one 
Freedom in Adam before his Fall, and another in St Paul 
after his conversion. Yet, though everywhere different, it is 
everywhere essentially the same. Although it admits of 
innumerable gradations, in every one it may be entire and 






GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


463 


perfect : and, wherever it is entire and perfect, all lesser 
distinctions vanish. One star . may indeed appear larger 
and brighter than another : but they are all permitted to 
nestle together on the impartial bosom of Night, and journey 
onward for ever, one mighty inseparable family. Nay, those 
which seem the smallest and feeblest, may perchance in 
reality be the largest and most splendid ; only our accidental 
position misleads our judgement. 

Independence on the other hand neither admits of degrees, 
nor of equality, neither of difference, nor of sameness. In fact 
nothing in the universe ever was, or ever can be, or was ever 
conceived to be independent; except forsooth the atoms of 
the Corpuscular Philosophy : and even this Philosophy was 
constrained to acknowledge, that a hubbub of independent 
entities can produce nothing beyond a hubbub of independent 
entities. Hence, after rarifying the contents of its logical 
airpump, until there was no possibility for anything to exist 
therein, it was forced to turn the cock, and let in a little air, 
for the sake of giving its atoms a partial impulse, and thus 
bringing them to coalesce and interdepend. 

Let it not be said that this is a fanciful quibble about 
words, and that Independence and Freedom mean the same 
thing in the end. They never did; they do not; they 
cannot. Independence is merely relative and outward : 
Freedom has its source within, in the depths of our spiritual 
life, and cannot subsist unless it is fed by fresh supplies 
from thence. Its essence is love ; for it is love that delivers 
us from the bondage of self. Its home is peace; from 
which indeed it often strays far, but for which it always 
feels a homesick longing. Its lifeblood is truth, which alone 
can free us from the delusions of the world, and of our own 
carnal nature. Whereas the essence of Independence is 
hatred and jealousy, its home strife and warfare : it feeds 
upon delusions, and is itself the greatest. It was not until 
the true idea of Freedom, as not only reconcilable with Law 
and Order and the obedience and sacrifice of the Will, but 
requiring them imperatively to preserve it from running 
riot and perishing in wilfulness, was fading away, that the 







464 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


new word Independence was set up in its room. Since that 
time the apostles of Independence in political and social life, 
and of Atheism, that kindred negation, in religion, have so 
bewildered their hearers and themselves, that it is become 
very difficult to revive the true idea of Freedom, and to 
make people understand how it is no way necessaiy, for the 
sake of becoming free, to pull down the whole edifice of 
society, with all its time-hallowed, majestic sanctities, and to 
scatter its stones about in singleness and independence on 
the ground. Yet assuredly it would not be more absurd to 
call such a multitude of scattered, independent stones a 
house, than to suppose that a million, or twenty millions, of 
independent human beings, each stickling for his independence, 
and carrying out this principle through the ramifications of 
civil and domestic life, can coalesce into a nation or a state. 
There is need of mortar : there is need of a builder, yes, of a 
master builder : there is need of dependence, coherence, 
subordination of the parts to the whole and to each other, u. 

A lawyer’s brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks 
freely. _ u. 

The most bigoted persons I have known have been in 
some things the most sceptical. The most sceptical noto¬ 
riously are often the greatest bigots. How account for this 1 
except on the supposition that they are trees of the same 
kind, accidentally planted on opposite hillocks, and swayed 
habitually by the violence of opposite and partial gusts, 
which have checkt their growth, twisted their tops, and 
pointed their stag-heads against each other with an aspect of 
hatred and defiance. 


The prophet who was slain by a lion, had a nobler and 
more merciful death than Bishop Hatto, who was eaten up 
by rats. Neither the crab, that walks with its back fore¬ 
most, nor the polypus, that fittest emblem of a democracy, 
ranks so high among animals, that we should be ambitious 
of imitating them in the construction of the body politic. 
















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


465 


Indeed it seems an instinct among animals, to hang down 
their tails; except when the peacock spreads his out in the 
sunshine of a gala day, with its rows of eyes tier above tier, 
like the vista of a merry theatre. Unless Society can effect 
by education, what Lord Monboddo holds man to have done 
by willing it, and can get rid of her tail, it will be wisest to 
let the educated classes keep their natural station at the 
head. u. 


At Avignon I saw some large baths in the garden by the 
temple of Diana, built on the foundations of the old Roman 
ones. Does anybody bathe here now 1 we askt ; for we could 
see no materials for the purpose. 

No; the guide answered. Before the Revolution , the rich 
used to bathe here: but they wanted to keep the baths to them¬ 
selves; and the poor wanted to come too; and now nobody comes. 

What an epitome of a revolution ! 

Few books have more than one thought: the generality 
indeed have not quite so many. The more ingenious authors 
of the former seem to think that, if they once get their 
candle lighted, it will burn on for ever. Yet even a candle 
gives a sorry, melancholy light, unless it has a brother 
beside it, to shine on it and keep it cheerful. For lights 
and thoughts are social and sportive : they delight in 
playing with and into each other. One can hardly conceive 
a duller state of existence than sitting at whist with three 
dummies : and yet many of our prime philosophers have 
seldom done anything else. u- 

To illustrate signifies to make clear. It would be well if 
writers would keep this in mind, and still better, if preachers 
were to do so. They would then feel the necessity of suiting 
their illustrations to their hearers. As it is, illustrations 
often seem to be stuck in for the same reason as shrubs 
round stables and outhouses, to keep the meaning out of 
sight. u - 


ii H 












466 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Apollo was content to utter his oracles, and left the 
hearers to make out their interpretation and meaning. So 
should his priests, poets. They should speak intelligibly 
indeed, but oracularly, even as all the works of nature are 
oracular, embodying her laws, and manifesting them, but 
not spelling them in words, not writing notes and glosses on 
themselves, not telling you that they know the laws under 
which they act. They are content to prove their knowledge 
by fashioning themselves and all their courses according to 
it: and they leave man to decipher the laws from the 
living hieroglyphics in which they are written. u. 

The progress of knowledge is slow. Like the sun, we 
cannot see it moving ; but after a while we perceive that it 
has moved, nay, that it has moved onward. u. 

A cobweb is soon spun, and still sooner swept away. u. 

We all love to be in the right. Granted. We like ex¬ 
ceedingly to have right on our side, but are not always 
particularly anxious about being on the side of right. We 
like to be in the right, when we are so ; but we do not like 
it, when we are in the wrong. At least it seldom happens 
that anybody, after emerging from childhood, is very 
thankful to those who are kind enough to take trouble for 
the sake of guiding him from the wrong to the right. Few 
in any age have been able to join heartily in the mag¬ 
nanimous declaration uttered by Socrates in the Gorgias : 
“I am one who would gladly be refuted, if I should say 
anything not true,—and would gladly refute another, should 
he say anything not true,—but would no less gladly be 
refuted than refute. For I deem it a greater advantage ; 
inasmuch as it is a greater advantage to be freed from the 
greatest of evils, than to free another; and nothing, I 
conceive, is so great an evil as a false opinion on matters of 
moral concernment.” 

With some such persons indeed, Hermann says he has 
met, after speaking of the prevalence of the opposite spirit, 










I 

GUESSES AT TRUTH. 467 

in the Preface to his second Edition of the Hecuba : “ Turn 
maxime irasci aliquem, quum se jure reprehensum videat, 
aliorum exemplis cognovi. Nec mirnm : piget enim errasse : 
illud vero mirum, si quos sibimet ipsis irasci aequius erat, 
iram in eos effundunt, a quibus sunt reprehensi, quasi horum, 
non sua sit culpa, vidisseque errorem gravius peccatum sit, 
quam commisisse. Sed inveni tamen etiam qui veri quam 
suae gloriae studiosiores non solum aequo animo et dissensionem 
et reprehensionem fervent , verum etiam ingenue confiterentur 
errorem , atque adeo gratias agerent monenti.” In act such 
persons, I am afraid, are rare; though in profession it is 
common enough to find people consenting to the declaration 
with which Sir Thomas Brown closes his Preface : “We 
shall only take notice of such, whose experimental and 
judicious knowledge shall solemnly look upon our work, not 
only to destroy of ours, but to establish of his own ; not to 
traduce or extenuate, but to explain and dilucidate, to add 
and ampliate.—Unto whom we shall not contentiously 
rejoin, or only to justify our own, but to applaud or confirm 
his maturer assertions; and shall confer what is in us unto 
his name and honour, ready to be swallowed in any worthy 
enlarger, as having acquired our end, if any way, or under 
any name, we may obtain a work so much desired, and yet 
desiderated of truth.” 

But it is no way surprising that abstract truth should 
kick the beam, when weighed against any personal prejudice 
or predilection; seeing that, even in things of more im¬ 
mediate human interest, we are often beguiled by our 
selfishness into desiring, not that which is desirable in itself, 
but that which we have in some manner associated with our 
vanity and our personal credit. If a misfortune which a 
man has prognosticated, befalls his friend, the monitor, 
instead of sympathizing and condoling with him, will often 
exclaim with a taunting tone of triumph : Didn't I tell you 
so 1 Another time you'll take my advice ... as if any one 
would be willing to take advice from so coldhearted and 
unfriendly a counsellor. There are those too, I am afraid, 
who would rather see their neighbours suffer, than their own 


H II 2 










463 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


forebodings fail. Jonah is not the only prophet of evil, 
whom it has displeased exceedingly , and who has been very 
j angry, because God is a gracious God, and merciful, slow to 
anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth Him of the evil. 
i The beautiful apologue of the gourd is still, and, I fear, ever 
will be, applicable to many. Indeed what are our most 
cherisht pleasures, for the loss of.which we are the angriest, 
even unto death ? but commonly such gourds, for which we 
I have not laboured, nor made them grow, which came up in a 
night, and perisht in a night. On them we have pity, because 
they were a shadow over our heads to deliver us from our 
griefs, and because their withering exposes us to the sun and 
wind. Yet let a man once have turned his face against his 
brethren,—and that, not for the wickedness of their hands 
or of their hearts, but merely for their holding some opinion 
or doctrine which he deems erroneous : it is not unlikely 
that he will be loth to see Nineveh spared, that great city, 
wherein are more than six-score thousand persons that cannot 
discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also 
much cattle. u. 

p 

The last words of the foregoing quotation remind me, 
that, in estimating the motives for and against any measure 
or measures, we rarely, if ever, look beyond the manner in 
which men will be affected thereby. Our lordly eyes cannot 
stoop to notice the happiness or misery of the animals 
beneath us. Indeed no one, except God, cares for more 
than a small particle of the universe. In reckoning up the 
horrours of war, we never think about the sufferings of the 
much cattle. I shall not forget a deserved rebuke which I 
received years ago from William Schlegel. He had been 
speaking of entering Leipsic on the day after the battle ; 
and I askt him whether it was not a glorious moment, 
thoughtlessly, or rather thinking of the grand consequences 
which sprang from that victory, more than of the scene 
itself. Glorious! he exclaimed : how could anybody think 
about glory, when crossing a plain covered for miles with 
thousands of his brethren, dead and dying ? And what to me 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


469 


ivas still more piteous , was the sight of the poor horses lying 
about so helplessly and patiently , uttering deep groans of agony, 
with no one to do anything for them. 

Among the heroic features in the character of our great 
commander, none,—except that sense of duty which in him 
is ever foremost, and throws all things else into the shade,— 
is grander than the sorrow for his companions who have 
fallen, which seems almost to overpower every other feeling, 
even in the flush of a victory. The conqueror of Bonaparte 
at Waterloo wrote on the day after, the 19th of June, to 
the Duke of Beaufort: “ The losses we have sustained, have 
quite broken me down; and I have no feeling for the 
advantages we have acquired.” On the same day too he 
wrote to Lord Aberdeen : “I cannot express to you the 
regret and sorrow with which I look round me, and con¬ 
template the loss which I have sustained, particularly in 
your brother. The glory resulting from such actions, so 
dearly bought, is no consolation to me ; and I cannot suggest 
it as any to you and his friends : but I hope that it may be 
expected that this last one has been so decisive, as that no 
doubt remains that our exertions and our individual losses 
will be rewarded by the early attainment of our just object. 
It is then that the glory of the actions in which our friends 
and relations have fallen, will be some consolation for their 
loss.” He who could write thus, had already gained a 
greater victory than that of Waterloo: and the less 
naturally follows the greater. u. 




Most men work for the present, a few for the future. The 
wise work for both, for the future in the present, and for the 
present in the future. u * 


There are great men enough to incite us to aim at true 
greatness, but not enough to make us fancy that God could 
not execute His purposes without them. 


Man’s works, even in their most perfect form, always have 
more or less of excitement in them. God’s works are calm 












470 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


and peaceful, both in Nature, and in His word. Hence 
Wordsworth, who is above all men the poet of Nature, 
seldom excites the feelings, because he is so true to his 
subject. _ °- 

Crimes sometimes shock us too much ; vices almost always 
too little. _ 

As art sank at Rome, comforts increast. Witness the 
baths of Caracalla and Diocletian. 


We sever what God has joined, and so destroy beauty, and 
| lose hold of truth. _ fl¬ 

it is quite right there should be an Inquisition. It is 
quite right there should be autos-da-fe. The more the 
better, if they are but real ones. There should be an Inqui¬ 
sition and autos-da-fe in every country, yea, in every town, 
yea, on every hearth, yea, in every heart. The evil hitherto 
has been that they have been far too few. Every man 
ought to be an inquisitor ; every man ought to perform 
autos-da-fe; often accompanied by death, not seldom by 
torture. Only his inquisition should be over himself; only 
his autos-da-fe should consist in the slaying of his own lusts 
and passions, in the firy sacrifice of his own stubborn, unbe¬ 
lieving will. 

These would be truly autos-da-fe. It is no act of faith 
for me to offer up another as a victim. On the contrary it 
is an act of unbelief. It shews I have no faith in my 
brother’s spiritual nature. It shews I have no faith in the 
power of God to work upon his heart and change it. It 
shews I have no faith in the sword of the Spirit, but hold 
the sword of the flesh to be mightier. 

Nor again can Faith exist in opposition to Love. Faith 
is the root of Love, the root without which Love cannot 
have any being. At times the root may be found, where 
the plant has not yet grown up to perfection. But no 
hatred, or other evil, malign passion can spring from the 

















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


471 


root of Faith. Wherever they are found, they grow from 
unbelief, from want of faith,—from want of faith in man, 
and from want of faith in God. 

Moreover such autos-da-fe would be sure of effecting 
their purpose, which the others never can. They would be 
acceptable to God. They would destroy what ought to be 
destroyed. And were we diligent in performing them, there 
would be no need of any others. 

This Inquisition should be set up in every soul. In some 
indeed it may at times be in abeyance. The happiest 
spirits are those by whom the will of God is done without 
effort or struggle. To this angelic nature however humanity 
can only approximate, and that too not at once, but by 
divers steps and stages, at every one of which new autos-dafe 
are required. u. 

Some people seem to think that Death is the only reality 
in Life. Others, happier and rightlier minded, see and feel 
that Life is the true reality in Death. u. 

Ye cannot serve God and Mammon. Is it indeed so h Alas 
then for England! For surely we profess to serve both ; 
and few can doubt that we do indeed serve one of the two, 
as zealously and assiduously as he himself can wish. But 
how must it be with our service to the other ? u. 


They who boast of their tolerance, merely give others 
leave to be as careless about religion as they are themselves. 
A walrus might as well pride itself on its endurance of cold. 

Few persons have courage enough to appear as good as 
they really are._ a- 

The praises of others may be of use, in teaching us, not 
what we are, but what we ought to be. a. 


Many people make their own God ; and he is much what 
the French may mean, when they talk of le bon Dieu ,—very 













472 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


indulgent, rather weak, near at hand when we want any¬ 
thing, but far away out of sight when we have a mind to do 
wrong. Such a god is as much an idol as if he were an 
image of stone. 

The errours of the good are often very difficult to eradicate, 
from being founded on mistaken views of duty. a. 


Truly a river is a very wilful thing, going as it will, and 
where it will. 


How should men ever change their religion 1 In its 
abasement honour prevents them, in its prosperity contempt. 
From their hights they cannot see, because they are so high. 
In their lowliness they dare not see, because they are too 
lowly. 

There is no being eloquent for atheism. In that exhausted 
receiver the mind cannot use its wings,—the clearest proof 
that it is out of its element. 


How different are summer storms from winter ones ! In 
winter they rush over the earth with all their violence ; and 
if any poor remnants of foliage or flowers have lingered 
behind, these are swept along at one gust. Nothing is left 
but desolation; and long after the rain has ceast, pools of 
water and mud bear token of what has been. But when the 
clouds have poured out their torrents in summer, when the 
winds have spent their fury, and the sun breaks forth again 
in its glory, all things seem to rise with renewed loveliness 
from their refreshing bath. The flowers glistening with rain¬ 
drops smell sweeter than before; the grass seems to have 
gained another brighter shade of green; and the young 
plants, which had hardly come into sight, have taken their 
place among their fellows in the borders; so quickly have 
they sprung up under the showers. The air too, which may 
previously have been oppressive, is become clear and soft and 
fresh. 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


473 


Such too is the difference, when the storms of affliction 
fall on hearts unrenewed by Christian faith, and on those 
who abide in Christ. In the former they bring out the 
dreariness and desolation, which may before have been unap- 
parent. The gloom is not relieved by the prospect of any 
cheering ray to follow it, of any flowers or fruit to shew its 
beneficence. But in the truly Christian soul, though weeping 
endure for a night , joy comes in the morning. A sweet smile 
of hope and love follows every tear; and tribulation itself is 
turned into the chief of blessings. a. 


We never know the true value of friends. While they 
live, we are too sensitive of their faults \ when we have lost 
them, we only see their virtues. a. 

So however ought it to be. When the perishable shrine 
has crumbled away, what can we see, except that which alone 
is imperishable 1 u. 

How few are our real wants ! and how easy is it to 
satisfy them! Our imaginary ones are boundless and 

insatiable. a. 


The king is the least independent man in his dominions,— 
the beggar the most so. a. 


Multa fiunt eadem sed aiiter , Quintilian (n. 20. 10) has 
justly remarkt. I have spoken above (p. 383) of the efficacy 
of manner in oratory ; and every attentive observer must 
perpetually have noticed its inestimable importance in all 
the occasions and concerns of social life. So great indeed 
is its power, and so much more do people in general value 
what their friend feels for them, than what he does for them, 
that there are few who would not look on you more kindly, 
if you were to meet their request with an affectionate denial, 
than with a cold compliance. 

Nay, even when the materials are the very same, and when 
they are arranged in the selfsame order, much will depend 
on the manner in which they are combined and groupt into 










474 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


separate units. An ice-house is very different from a nice 
house ; and a dot will turn a million into one. 

A like thought is exprest in the following stanza, which 
closes a poem prefixt by Thomas Newton to the Mirror for 
Magistrates. 

Certes this world a stage may well be called, 

Whereon is plaid the part of every wight: 

Some, now aloft, anon with malice galled 
Are from high state brought into dismal plight. 

Like counters are they, which stand now in sight 
For thousand or ten thousand, and anon 

Removed stand perhaps for less than one. u. 

The mind is like a trunk. If well packt, it holds almost 
everything ; if ill packt, next to nothing. 

To say No with a good grace is a hard matter. To say 
Yes with a good grace is sometimes still harder, at least for 
men. With women perhaps it may be otherwise. I wonder 
how many have married for no other reason, than that they 
had not the strength of mind to say No. U. 

Discipline, like the bridle in the hand of a good rider, 
should exercise its influence without appearing to do so, should 
be ever active, both as a support and as a restraint, yet seem 
to lie easily in hand. It must always be ready to check or to 
pull up, as occasion may require ; and only when the horse is 
a runaway, should the action of the curb be perceptible, a. 

Many expressions, once apt and emphatic, have been so 
rubbed and worn away by long usage, that they retain as 
little substance as the skeletons of wheels which have made 
the grand tour on the Continent. They glide at length like 
smoke through a chimney, not even impinging against the 
roof of the mouth; and after a month’s repetition they leave 
nothing behind more solid or more valuable than soot. 
Words gradually lose their character, and, from being the 
tokens and exponents of thoughts, become mere air-propel¬ 
ling sounds. To counteract this disastrous tendency, Boyle, 
it is said, never uttered the name of God, without bowing 













GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


475 


his head. Such practices are indeed liable to mischievous 
abuse : a superstitious value will be attacht to the outward 
act, even when it is separated from the inward and spi¬ 
ritual : and it is too well known that the eyes have often 
been ogling a lover, while the fingers have been telling Ave- 
Maries on a rosary. It may be too, that, among the educated, 
listlessness of mind is rather encouraged by any recurring 
formal motion of the body. Else there is a value in whatever 
may help us to preserve the freshness and elasticity of our 
feelings, and enable the heart to leap up at the sight of a 
rainbow in manhood and in old age, as it did in childhood. 
Even the faults of our much abused climate are thus in many 
respects blessings. They give a liveliness to our enjoyment 
of a fine day, such as cannot be felt between the Tropics. 

How then is our nature to be fitted for the joys of Para¬ 
dise 1 How can we be happy unceasingly, without ceasing 
to be happy 1 How is satisfaction to be disentangled from 
satiety h which now palls upon the heart and intellect, almost 
as much as upon the senses. A strange and potent trans¬ 
formation must be wrought in us. Our hearts must no 
longer be capricious : our imaginations must no longer be 
vagrant: our wills must no longer be wilful. 

The process by which this transformation is to be brought 
about, is set forth by Butler in his excellent chapter, the 
most valuable perhaps in the whole Analogy, on a State of 
Moral Discipline ; where he shews that, while passive im¬ 
pressions grow weaker by repetition, “ practical habits are 
formed and strengthened by repeated acts.” So that the 
true preparation for heaven is a life of godliness on earth. 
At the same time we should remember how, as Milton says 
with characteristic grandeur in the first chapter of his Reason 
of Church-Government, “ it is not to be conceived that those 
eternal effluences of sanctity and love in the glorified saints 
should be confined and cloyed with repetition of that which 
is prescribed, but that our happiness may orb itself into a 
thousand vagancies of glory and delight, and with a kind of 
eccentrical equation be, as it were, an invariable planet of 
joy and felicity.” _ u. 







476 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Whatever is the object of our constant attention will 
naturally be the chief object of our interest. Even the feelings 
of speculative men become speculative. They care about the 
notions of things, and their abstractions, and their relations, 
far more than about the realities. Thus an author’s blood 
will turn to ink. Words enter into him, and take possession 
of him ; and nothing can obtain admission except through 
the passport of words. He cannot admire anything, until he 
has had time to reflect and throw back its cold, inanimate 
image from the mirror of his Understanding, blind to every 
shape but a shadow, deaf to every sound but an echo. 
Inverting the legitimate process, he regards things as the 
symbols of words, instead of words as the symbols of 
things. • u. 

Literary dissipation is no less destructive of sympathy with 
the living world, than sensual dissipation. Mere intellect is 
as hard-hearted and as heart-hardening as mere sense ; and 
the union of the two, when uncontrolled by the conscience, 
and without the softening, purifying influences of the moral 
affections, is all that is requisite to produce the diabolical 
ideal of our nature. Nor is there any repugnance in either to 
coalesce with the other: witness Iago, Tiberius, Borgia. u. 

The body too has its rights ; and it will have them. They 
cannot be trampled upon or slighted without peril. The 
body ought to be the soul’s best friend, and cordial, dutiful 
helpmate. Many of the studious how r ever have neglected to 
make it so; wdience a large part of the miseries of author¬ 
ship. Some good men have treated it as an enemy; and 
then it has become a fiend, and has plagued them, as it did 
Antony. u. 


The balance of powers in the human constitution has been 
subverted by that divorce between the body and the mind, 
which has often ensued from the seductive influences of 
Civilization. The existence of one class of society has been 
rendered almost wholly corporeal, that of the other almost 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


477 


solely intellectual,—but intellectual in the lowest sense of 
the word, and so that the intellect has been degraded into a 
caterer for the wants and pleasures of the body, instead of 
devoting itself to its rightful purposes, the pursuit, the en¬ 
forcement, and the exhibition of Truth. Moreover the per¬ 
nicious, debilitating tendencies of bodily pleasure need to be 
counteracted by the invigorating exercises of bodily labour; 
whereas bodily labour without bodily pleasure converts the 
body into a mere machine, and brutifies the soul. u. 

What a loss is that of the village-green ! It is a loss to the 
picturesque beauty of our English landscapes. A village-green 
is almost always a subject for a painter, who is fond of quiet 
home scenes, with its old, knotty, wide-spreading oak or elm 
or ash, its grey church-tower, its cottages scattered in pleasing 
disorder around, each looking out of its leafy nest, its flock 
of geese sailing to and fro across it. Where such spots are 
still found, they refresh the wayworn traveler, wearied by 
the interminable hedge-walls with which “restless owner¬ 
ship,”—to use an expression of Wordsworth’s,—excludes 
profane feet from its domain consecrated to Mammon. 

The main loss however is that to the moral beauty of our 
landscapes, that to the innocent, wholesome pleasures of the 
poor. The village-green was the scene of their sports, of 
their games. It was the playground for their children. It 
served for trapball, for cricket, for manly, humanizing amuse¬ 
ments, in which the gentry and farmers might unite with 
the peasantry. How dreary is the life of the English hus¬ 
bandman now ! “ double, double toil and trouble,” day after 
day, month after month, year after year, uncheered by sym¬ 
pathy, unenlivened by a smile, sunless, moonless, starless. 
He has no place to be merry in but the beershop, no amuse¬ 
ments but drunken brawls, nothing to bring him into 
innocent, cheerful fellowship with his neighbours. The 
stories of village sports sound like legends of a mythical 
age, prior to the time when “ Sabbathless Satan,” as Charles 
Lamb has so happily termed him, set up his throne in 
the land. 







47S 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


It would be a good thing, if our landed proprietors would 
try to remedy some of the evils which the ravenous lust of 
property has wrought in England during the last century. 
It would be well, if by the side of every village two or three 
acres were redeemed from the gripe of Mammon, and thrown 
open to the poor,—if they were taught that their betters, as 
we presume to call ourselves, take thought about other 
things, beside the most effectual method of draining the last 
drop from the sweat of their brows. Something at least 
should be done to encourage and foster the domestic affec¬ 
tions among the lower orders, to make them feel that they 
too have a home, and that a home is the dearest spot upon 
earth. I do not mean, by instituting prizes for those whose 
cottages are the neatest, or by giving rewards for good 
behaviour to the best husbands and wives, the best sons and 
daughters. Such rewards, unless there be something of 
playful humour connected with them, as was the case with 
the old flitch of bacon, do far more harm than good, by 
robbing virtuous conduct of its sweetness and real worth, 
turning it into an instrument of covetousness or of vanity. 
The only reward which is not hurtful, is a kind word, or an 
approving smile : for this, delightful as it is, is so slight and 
transient, it can never find place among the motives to 
exertion. 

All that ought to be done, all that can be done bene¬ 
ficially, is to remove hindrances which obstruct good, and 
facilities and temptations to evil, and to afford oppor¬ 
tunities and facilities for quiet, orderly, decorous enjoyment. 
When encouragement is given, it should be by immediate 
personal intercourse. The great Christian law of recipro¬ 
cation extends to the affections also. Indeed with regard 
to them it is a law of Nature. We cannot gain love and 
respect from others, unless we treat them with love and 
respect. 

The same reason which calls for the restoration of our 
village greens, calls no less imperatively in London for the 
throwing open of the gardens in all the squares. What s 
bright refreshing spots would these be in the midst of our 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


479 


huge brick and stone labyrinth, if we saw them crowded on 
summer evenings with the tradespeople and mechanics from 
the neighbouring streets, and if the poor children, who now 
grow up amid the filth and impurities of the allies and 
courts, were allowed to run about these playgrounds, so 
much healthier both for the body and the mind ! We have 
them all ready : a word may open them. He who looks at 
the good which has been effected by the alterations in St 
James Park, he whose heart has been gladdened by the 
happiness derived from them by young and old, must surely 
think the widest extension of similar blessings most desir¬ 
able : and the state of that Park shews that no mischiefs are 
to be apprehended. 

At present the gardens in our squares are painful memen¬ 
toes of aristocratic exclusiveness. They who need them the 
least monopolize them. All the fences and walls by which 
this exclusiveness bars itself out from the sympathies of 
common humanity, must be cast down. If we do not 
remove them voluntarily, and in the spirit of love, they will 
be torn and trodden down ere long perforce, in the spirit of 
wrath. u. 

It is a blessed thing that we cannot enclose the sky. But 
who knows? Will not “restless ownership” long in time, 
like Alexander, for a new world to appropriate ? and then a 
Joint-stock Company will be establisht to send up balloons 
for the pin-pose. Parliament too will doubtless display its 
boasted omnipotence by passing an Act to grant them a 
monopoly, commanding the winds to offer them no molesta¬ 
tion in their enterprise, and enjoining that, if any planet be 
caught trespassing, it shall be impounded, and that all comets 
shall be committed forthwith for vagrancy. u. 

— 

Quaerenda pecunia primum est ; Virtus post nummos. But 
that post never arrives ; at least it did not at Rome, whatever 
may be the case in England. The very influx of the nummi 
retarded it, and kept Virtus at a distance. In fact she is of 
a jealous nature, and never comes at all, unless she comes in 
!_ 












480 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


the first place. That which is a man’s alpha will also be his 
omega ; and, in advancing from one to the other, his velocity 
is mostly accelerated at every step. u. 

Messieurs, Mesdames, voici la verite. Personne n’ecoute. 
Personne ne s’en soucit. Personne n’en veut. Peutetre on 
ne m’a pas entendu. Essayons encore une fois. Messieurs, 
Mesdames, voici la veritable verite. Elle vient expres de 
l’autre monde, pour se montrer a vous. On passe en avant. 
On s’enfuit. On ne me regarde que pour se moquer de moi. 
Malheureux que je suis, on me laissera mourir de faim. Que 
faire done % II faut absolument changer de cri. Messieurs, 
Mesdames, voici le vrai moyen pour gagner de l’argent. 
Mondieu ! Quelle foule ! Je ne puis plus. J’etouffe. 

C’est une histoire qui est assez commune. u. 

One now and then meets with people on whose faces, in 
whose manner, in whose words, one may read a bill giving 
notice that they are to be lett or sold. They also profess to 
be furnisht : but everybody knows what the furniture of a 
ready-furnisht house usually is. u. 

Nothing hides a blemish so completely as cloth of gold. 
This is the first lesson that heirs and heiresses commonly 
learn. Would that equal pains were taken to convince them, 
that the having inherited a good cover for blemishes does 
not entail any absolute necessity of providing blemishes for 
it to cover ! 


Sauve qui peut ! Bonaparte is said to have exclaimed at 
Waterloo, along with his routed army. At all events this 
was the rule by which he regulated his actions, in prosperity 
as well as in adversity. For what is Vole qui peut ! but the 
counterpart of Sauve qui peut ? And who are they that will 
cry to the mountains, Cover us, and to the rocks, Fall on us, 
but they who have acted on the double-faced rule, Vole qui 
peut, and Sauve qui peut ? 

What an awful and blessed contrast to this cry presents 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


4S1 


itself, when we think of Him of whom His enemies said, He 
saved others : Himself He cannot save ! They knew not how 
true the first words were, nor how indissolubly they were 
connected with the latter, how it is only by losing our life 
that we can either save others or ourselves. u. 


Few minds are sun-like, sources of light in themselves and 
to others. Many more are moons, that shine with a deriva¬ 
tive and reflected light. Among the tests to distinguish 
them is this : the former are always full, the latter only now 
and then, when their suns are shining full upon them. u. 

Hold thy peace ! says Wisdom to Folly. Hold thy peace ! 
replies Folly to Wisdom. 

Fly ! cries Light to Darkness : and Darkness echoes back, 
Fly! 

The latter chase has been going on since the beginning of 
the world, without an inch of ground gained on either side. 
May we believe that the result has been different in the con¬ 
test between Wisdom and Folly ? u * 

People have been sounding the alarm for many years past 
all over Europe against what they call obscurantism and 
obscurantists ; that is, against a supposed plot to extinguish 
all the new lights of our days, and to draw down the night 
of the middle ages on the awakening eyes of mankind. That 
such plans, mad as they may appear, are not too mad for 
those who live in a world of dreams,—that there are human 
bats, who, having ventured out into the daylight, fly back 
scared to their dark haunts, and would have all men follow 
them thither,—we know by sad recent examples. But, even 
without this special cause, the alarm is timely : indeed it can 
never be out of time. For the true obscurantists are the 
passions, the prejudices, the blinding delusions of our nature, 
warpt by evil habits and self-indulgence ; the real obscurantism 
is bigotry, in all its forms, which are many, and even opposite. 
There is the Pharisaic obscurantism, which would put out 
the earthly lights, and the Sadducean, which would put out 











482 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


the heavenly: and these, in times of peril, when they are 
trembling for their beloved darkness, combine and conspire. 
Nor has any class of men been busier in this way, than many 
of those who have boasted loudly of being the enlighteners 
of their age. In fact they who brag of their tolerance, have 
often been among the fiercest bigots, and worse than their 
opponents, from deeming themselves better. u. 

If your divines are not philosophers, your philosophy will 
neither be divine, nor able to divine. 


No animal continues so long in a state of infancy as man ; 
no animal is so long before it can stand. And is not this 
still truer of our souls than of our bodies 1 For when are 
they out of their infancy 'l when can they be said to stand ? 
Yet, till they can, how much do they need a strong hand to 
uphold them ! 


Alas for the exalted of the earth, that oversight is oversight! 

Many a man has lost being a great man by splitting into 
two middling ones. Atone yourself to the best of your 
power; and then Christ will atone for you. 


Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming 
better than you are. n 


Age seems to take away the power of acting a character, 
even from those who have done so the most successfully 
, during the main part of their lives. The real man will 
appear, at first fitfully, and then predominantly. Time 
spares the chisseled beauty of stone and marble, but makes 
sad havock in plaster and stucco. 


The truth of this remark has been especially evinced in 
France, owing to the prevalent artificialness of the French 
character. Hence the want of dignity in old age, noticed 
above (p. 429). Of course too this deficiency has been most 
















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


483 


conspicuous npon the throne of the Grand Monarque , even 
down to the present times. In this respect at least Bona¬ 
parte was a thorough Frenchman. Huge events succeeded 
each other in his life so rapidly, that he lived through years 
in months ; and adversity tore off the mask from him, which 
age cracks and splits in others. 

We have the heavenly assurance that the path of the just 
is to shine more and more unto the perfect day. But this 
blessed truth involves its opposite, that the path of the 
wicked must grow darker and darker unto the total night . . . 
unless he give heed to the voice which calls him out of his 
darkness, and turn to the light which is ever striving to 
illumine it. u. 


Self-depreciation is not humility, though often mistaken 
for it. Its source is oftener mortified pride. a. 


The corruption and perversity of the world, which should 
be our strongest stimulants to do what we can to remove 
and correct them, are often pleaded by the religious as 
excuses for withdrawing from the world and doing nothing. 
How unlike is this to the example of Him, who concluded all 
under sin, that He might have mercy upon all, that He 
might take their sinful nature upon Him, to purify it from 
its sinfulness! a. 


How oft the heart, when wrapt in passion’s arms, 
Reels, by the tumult stunned, or conscience-wounded, 
Or deafened with the trumpet-tongued alarms 
The victim’s selfdevotedness has sounded ! 

What then remains ? a gust of half-enjoyments, 

That, twisting memory to a vain regret, 

Prepares for age that saddest of employments, 

A desperate endeavour to forget. 

Help, help us, Spirit of Good ! and, hither gliding, 
Bring, on the wings of Jesus intercession, 

The firy sword o’er Eden’s tree presiding, 

To guard our tempted fancies from transgression. 


The devils, we are told, believe and tremble. Our part is to 


11 x 










481 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


believe and love. But it is hard to convince people that 
nothing short of this can be true Christian faith. So, 
because they are sometimes terrified by the thought of God, 
they fancy they believe, though their hearts are far away 
from Him. a. 


At the end of a hot summer, the children in the streets 
look almost as pale and parcht as the grass in the fields : and 
every object one sees may suggest profitable meditations on 
the incapacity of all things earthly, be they human, animal, 
or vegetable, to support unmixt, uninterrupted sunshine . . . 
a truth which the sands of Africa teach as demonstratively, 
as the Polar ice teaches the converse. u. 


The story of Amphion sets forth how, whatever we may 
have to build, be it a house, a city, or a church, the most 
powerful of all powers that we can employ in building it, is 
harmony and love. Only the love must be of a genuine, 
lasting kind, not a spirit of weak compromise, sacrificing 
principles to expedients, and abandoning truths for the sake 
of tying a loveknot of errours, but strong from being in unison 
with what alone is true and lasting, the will and word of God. 
Else the bricks will fall out, as quickly as they have fallen in. u. 

Philosophy cannot raise the bulk of mankind up to her 
level: therefore, if she is to become popular, she must 
descend to theirs. This she cannot do without a twofold 
grave injury. She will debase herself, and will puff up her 
disciples. She will no longer dwell on high, beside the 
primal sources of truth, uttering her voice from thence, 
pouring the streams of wisdom among the masses of man¬ 
kind. She will come down, and set up a company to supply 
their houses with water at a cheap rate. Whereupon ensues 
the blessing of competition between rival Philosophies, each 
striving to be more popular, that is, more superficial than 
the others. In such a state of things, it is almost fortunate 
if the name of Philosophy be usurpt by Science, which, as 
dealing with outward things, may with less degradation be 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


4^5 | 

adapted to material wants, and from which it is easier to j 
draw practical results, without holding deep communings with 
primary principles. 

There is only one way in which Philosophy can truly 
become popular, that which Socrates tried, and which 
centuries after was perfected in the Gospel,—that which tells 
men of their divine origin and destiny, of their heavenly 
duties and calling. This comes home to men’s hearts and 
bosoms, and, instead of puffing them up, humbles them. But 
to be efficient, this should flow down straight from a higher 
sphere. Even in its Socratic form, it was supported by those 
higher principles, which we find set forth with such power 
and beauty by Plato. In Christian Philosophy on the other 
hand, the latter has come down from heaven, and the angels 
are continually descending and ascending along it. Were this 
heavenly ladder withdrawn or cut off, our Philosophy,—that 
part of it which sallied beyond the pale of empirical Psycho¬ 
logy and formal Logic,—would become mere vulgar gossip 
about Expediency, Utility, and the various other nostrums 
for diluting and medicating evil until it turns into good. u. 

In the lower realms of Nature, all things are subject to 
uniform, unvarying, calculable laws. To these laws they 
submit with unswerving obedience ; so that with regard to 
the heavenly bodies we can tell what has been thousands 
of years ago, and. what will be thousands of years hence, 
with the nicest precision. As we enter into the regions of 
Life, we seem also to enter into the regions of Chance. We 
can no longer predicate with the same confidence concerning 
individuals, but are obliged to limit our conclusions to 
genera and species. Still there is a universal order, a mani¬ 
fest sequence of cause and effect, a prevailing congruity and 
harmony, until we mount up to man. But when we make 
man the object of our observations and speculations, whether 
as he exists in the present world, or as he is set before us in 
the records of history, inconsistencies, incongruities, contra¬ 
dictions are so common, that we rather wonder when we find 
an instance of strict consistency, of undeviating conformity to 










486 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


any law or principle. Disorder at first sight seems the only 
order, discord the only harmony. Yet we may not doubt 
that here also there is an order and a harmony, working itself 
out, although our faculties are not capable of apprehending 
it, and though the calculus has hitherto transcended our 
powers. At all events, to adopt the image used by Bacon in 
a passage quoted above (p. 309), if we hear little else than a 
dissonant screeching of multitudinous noises now, which only 
blend in the distance into a roar like that of the raging sea, it 
behoves us to hold fast to the assurance that this is the 
necessary process whereby the instruments are to be tuned 
for the heavenly consort. Though Chaos may only have been 
driven out of a pari of his empire as yet, that empire is 
undergoing a perpetual curtailment; and in the end he will 
be cast out of the intellectual and moral and spiritual world, 
as entirely as out of the material. u. 

It would be very strange, unless inconsistencies and con¬ 
tradictions were thus common in the history of mankind, 
that the operation of Mathematical Science,—emanating as 
it does wholly from the Reason, and incapable of moving a 
step except so far as it is supported by the laws of the 
Reason,—should have been, both in England and France, to 
undermine the empire of the power from which it proceeds, 
and which alone can render it stable and certain. Such how¬ 
ever has been the fact; and it has been brought about in 
divers ways. 

Attempts were made to subject moral and spiritual truths 
to the selfsame processes, which were found to hold good in 
the material world, but against which they revolted as incom¬ 
patible with their free nature. Then that which would not 
submit to the same strict logical formules, was treated as an 
outcast from the domain of Reason, and handed over to the 
empirical Understanding, which judges of expediency, and 
utility, and the adaptation of means to ends. Sometimes too 
this faculty, which at best is only the prime minister of 
Reason, its Maire du Palais , was confounded with and 
supplanted it. 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


4S7 


Hence the name itself grew to be abused and wholly mis¬ 
applied. A man who fashions his conduct so as to fit all the 
windings of the world, and who moreover has the snowball’s 
talent of gathering increase at every step, is called a very 
reasonable man. He on the other hand, who devotes himself 
to the service of some idea breathed into him by the Reason, 
and who in his zeal for this forgets to make friends with the 
Mammon of Unrighteousness,—he who desires and demands 
that the hearts and minds of his neighbours should be 
brought into conformity to the supreme laws of the Reason, 
and that the authority of these laws should be recognized in 
the councils of nations,—is by all accounted most unreason¬ 
able , and by many pitied as half mad. 

It may be that this was the natural, and for a time irre¬ 
pressible consequence, when Mathematics enlisted among 
the retainers of Commerce, and when the abstractions of 
Geometry, being employed among the principles of mechanical 
construction, could thus be turned to account, and were 
therefore eagerly embraced for purposes of trade. Profitable 
Science cast unprofitable Science into the background: she 
was ashamed of her poorer sister, and denied her. The 
multitude, the half-thinking, half-taught multitude have 
always been idolatrous. In order to be roused out of their 
inert torpour, they require some visible, tangible effigy of 
that which cannot be seen or toucht. Thus the same per¬ 
verseness, which led men to worship the creature instead of 
the Creator, led them also to set up Utility as the foundation 
of Morality, and to substitute the occasional rules and the 
variable maxims of the Understanding for the eternal laws 
and principles of the Reason. u * 

We ask, what is the use of a thing? Our forefathers 
askt, what is it good for? They saw far beyond us. A 
thing may seem, and even to a certain extent be useful, 
without being good : it cannot be good, without being useful. 
The two qualities do indeed always coincide in the end : but 
the worth of a criterion is to be simple, plain, and as nearly 
certain as may be. Now that which a man in a sound and 







488 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


calm mind sincerely deems good, always is so : that which he 
may deem useful, may often be mischievous, nay, I believe, 
mostly will be so, unless some reference to good be introduced 
into the solution of the problem. For no mind ever sailed 
steadily, without moral principle to ballast and right it. 

Besides, when you have ascertained what is good, you are 
already at the goal; to which Utility will only lead you by a 
long and devious circuit, where at every step you risk losing 
your way. You may abuse and misuse : you cannot ungood. u. 

So far is the calculation of consequences from being an in¬ 
fallible, universal criterion of Duty, that it never can be so in 
any instance. Only when the voice of Duty is silent, or 
when it has already spoken, may we allowably think of the 
consequences of a particular action, and calculate how far it 
is likely to fulfill what Duty has enjoined, either by its 
general laws, or by a specific edict on this occasion. But 
Duty is above all consequences, and often, at a crisis of 
difficulty, commands us to throw them overboard. Fiat 
Justitia; pereat Mundus. It commands us to look neither 
to the right, nor to the left, but straight onward. Hence 
every signal act of Duty is altogether an act of Faith. It is 
performed in the assurance that God will take care of the 
consequences, and will so order the course of the world, that, 
whatever the immediate results may be, His word shall not 
return to Him empty._ u. 

It is much easier to think right without doing right, than 
to do right without thinking right. Just thoughts may, 
and wofully often do fail of producing just deeds; but just 
deeds are sure to beget just thoughts. For, when the heart 
is pure and straight, there is hardly anything which can 
mislead the understanding in matters of immediate personal 
concernment. But the clearest understanding can do little 
in purifying an impure heart, the strongest little in straight¬ 
ening a crooked one. You cannot reason or talk an Augean 
stable into cleanliness. A single day’s work would make 
more progress in such a task than a century’s words. 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


489 


Thus our Lord’s blessing on knowledge is only conditional: 
If ye know these things , happy are ye if ye do them (John 
xiii. 17). But to action His promise is full and certain : If 
any man will do His will , he shall know of the doctrine , whether 
it is of God. John vii. 17. u. 

One of the saddest things about human nature is, that a 
man may guide others in the path of life, without walking in 
it himself; that he may be a pilot, and yet a castaway. u. 


The original principle of lots is a reliance on the imme¬ 
diate, ever-present, all-ruling providence of God, and on His 
interposition to direct man’s judgement, when it is at a fault. 
The same was the principle of trials by ordeal. But here, 
as in so many other cases, the practice long outlasted the 
principle which had prompted it. Although the soul fled ages 
ago, the body still cumbers the ground, and poisons the air. 
Duels, in which a point of honour is allowed to sanction 
revenge and murder, have taken the place of the ancient 
judicial combats; and, after losing the belief which in some 
measure justified the religious lotteries of our ancestors, we 
betook ourselves to mercenary lotteries in their stead. The 
motive was no longer to obtain justice, but to obtain money, 
—the principle, confidence, not in all-seeing, all-regulating 
Wisdom, but in blind, all-confounding Chance. u. 

The greatest truths are the simplest: and so are the 
greatest men. _ u * 

There are some things in which we may well envy the 
members of the Church of Rome,—in nothing more than in 
the reverence which they feel for whatever has been conse¬ 
crated to the service of their religion. It may be, that they 
often confound the sign with the thing signified, and merge 
the truth in the symbol. We on the other hand, in our 
eagerness to get rid of the signs, have not been careful 
enough to preserve the things signified. We have sometimes 
hurt the truth, in stripping off the symbols it was clothed in, 













490 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


For instance, they can allow their churches to stand open 
all day long; and the reverence felt by the whole people for 
the house of God is their pledge that nobody will dare to 
rob or injure it. The want of such a reverence in England 
is perhaps in the main an offset from that superstitious 
hatred of superstition and idolatry which was so prevalent 
among the Puritans, through which they would drag the 
Communion-table into the middle of the nave, and turn it 
into a seat for the lowest part of the congregation, and would 
seem almost to have fancied that, because God has no regard 
for earthly beauty or splendour, He must needs look with 
special favour on meanness and filth,—that, as He does not 
respect what man respects, He must respect what man is 
offended by. The multitude of our sects too, which, if they 
agree in little else, are nearly unanimous in their hostility to 
the National Church, has done much to impair the reverence 
for her buildings; more especially since the practical exclu¬ 
sion of the lower orders from the ministry, while almost all the 
functions connected with religion are exercised by the clergy 
alone, has in a manner driven those among the lower orders, 
who have felt a calling to labour in the work of the Gospel, into 
societies where they could find a field for their activity and zeal. 

In fact this prejudice, as it is termed, has shared the same 
fate with our other prejudices,—that is, with those senti¬ 
ments, whether evil or good, the main source of which lies 
in the affections,—and has been trampled under foot and 
crusht. by the tyrannous despotism of the Understanding. Not 
that the Understanding has emancipated us from prejudices. 
Liable as it is to err, even more so perhaps than any of our 
other faculties,—or at all events more self-satisfied and 
obstinate in its errours,—our prejudices have only lost what 
was kindly and pleasing about them, and have become more 
inveterate, and consequently more hurtful; because the bias 
and warp which the Understanding receives, is now caused 
solely by selfishness and self-will; whereby it becomes more 
prone than ever to look askance on all things connected with 
the ideal and imaginative, the heroic and religious parts of 
our nature. 






GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


491 


How fraught with errour and mischief our present systems 
of Moral Philosophy are, may be perceived from the tone of 
feeling prevalent with regard to such matters, even among 
the intelligent and the young. I was at a party the other 
day, where the recent act of sacrilege in King’s College 
Chapel (in 1816) became the subject of conversation. An 
opinion was exprest, that, if a man must rob, it is better he 
should rob a church than a dwelling-house. I lookt on this 
as nothing else than one of those paradoxes, which ingenious 
men are ever starting, whether for the sake of saying some¬ 
thing strange, or to provoke a discussion; and for which 
therefore their momentariness and unpremeditatedness are 
mostly a sufficient excuse. Still, deeming it a rash and 
dangerous intrusion on holy ground, I took up my parable 
against it. To my astonishment I found that the opinion of 
every person present was opposed to mine. It was their 
deliberate conviction, resting, they conceived, on grounds of 
the soundest philosophy, that to rob a church is better than 
to rob a dwelling-house. The argument on which this con¬ 
viction was based, may easily be guest: for of course there 
was but one,—on which all rang the changes,—that a man 
who robs a dwelling-house runs a risk of being led to commit 
murder; whereas robbing a church is only robbing a church. 
Only robbing a church ! Let us look, what is the real 
nature and tendency of the act, which is thus puft aside by 
the help of this little word, only. 

In doing so I will waive all such considerations as are drawn 
mainly from the feelings. I will not insist on the coward¬ 
liness of plundering what has been left without defense, or 
on the treacherousness of violating that confidence in the 
probity of the people, which leaves our churches unguarded ; 
although both these considerations add a moral force to the 
legal enactments against horse-stealing, and would justify 
them, if they wanted any further justification than their 
obvious necessity. Nor will I urge the moral turpitude of 
being utterly destitute of that reverence, which every 
Christian, without disparagement to his intellectual freedom, 
may reasonably be expected to entertain for objects sanctified 









492 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


by the holy uses they are devoted to. Notwithstanding my 
persuasion of the inherent wisdom of our moral affections, I 
will pass by all the arguments with which they would 
furnish me, and will agree to look at the question merely as 
a matter of policy, but of policy on the highest and widest 
scale, in the assurance that, if the affairs of men are indeed 
ordered and directed by an All-wise Providence, the paths of 
moral duty and of political expediency will always be found 
to be one and the same. 

If however we are to test the evil of an act, not by that 
which lies in it, and which it essentially involves,—by the 
outrage it commits against our moral feelings, by its violation 
of the laws of the Conscience,—but by its consequences; at 
all events we should look at those consequences which spring 
from it naturally and necessarily, not at those which have no 
necessary, though they may have an accidental and occa¬ 
sional connexion with it, like that of murder with robbery in 
a dwelling-house. Now it is an axiom of all civil wisdom, 
which, confirmed as it is by the experience of ages, and by 
the testimony of every sage statesman and philosopher, it 
would be a waste of time here to establish by argument, 
that, without religion, no civil society can subsist. That is 
to say, unless the great mass of a nation are united by some 
one predominant feeling, which blends and harmonizes the 
diversities of individual character, represses and combines 
the waywardnesses of individual wills, and forms a centre, 
around which all their deeper feelings may cluster and 
coalesce, no nation can continue for a succession of genera¬ 
tions as one body corporate, or a single whole. There may 
indeed be many diversities, and even conflicting repugnances 
among sects ; but there must be a religious feeling spreading 
through the great body of the people; and that religious 
feeling must in the main be one and the same : it must have 
the same groundwork of faith, the same objects of reverence 
and fear and love : else the nation will merely be a com¬ 
bination of discordant units, that will have no hearty, lasting 
bond of union, and may split into atoms at any chance blow. 
A proof of this is supplied by the dismal condition of Ireland: 






GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


493 


for, though the opposite forms of Christianity which have 
prevailed there, have so much in common, that, notwith¬ 
standing the further instance of Germany to the contrary, 
one cannot pronounce it impossible for them to coalesce into 
a national unity, the effect hitherto has only been endless 
contention and strife. Therefore whatever violates or 
shakes the religious feelings of a nation, is an assault on the 
very foundations of its existence. But that every act of 
sacrilege, unless it be visited by general abhorrence, must 
weaken and sap these religious feelings, will hardly be ques¬ 
tioned. Wherever such feelings exist, an act of sacrilege must 
needs be regarded as an outrage against everything sacred, 
and must be reprobated and punisht as such. Although it 
is not directly an outrage against human life, it is one against 
that which gives human life its highest dignity and precious¬ 
ness, that without which human life would be worth little 
more than the life of other animals. Hence, of all crimes, it 
is the most injurious to the highest interests of the nation. 

Besides, should sacrilege become at all common,—which 
may God in mercy to our country avert!—it would be 
necessary to station a watchman or sentry to guard all our 
churches, or else to remove everything valuable contained in 
them, as soon as the congregation disperst. And what a 
brand of ignominy would it be to us among the nations of 
Christendom, that we are such inborn, ingrained thieves, as 
to be unable to restrain the itching of our hands even in the 
holy temples of our religion ! What a confession of shame 
would it be, that, in the consciousness of this incurable 
disease, we had been forced to legislate for the sake of 
checking the increase of this our bosom sin, and had taken a 
lesson from the pot-houses, to which the refuse of the people 
resort, and where the knives and forks are chained to the 
table ! that we should be unable to trust ourselves, to put 
the slightest trust in our own honesty, even when religion is 
superadded to the ordinary motives for preserving it! Yet, 
if we have learnt any lesson from our own history, and from 
that of the world, it should be, that the most precious part 
of a nation’s possessions, no less than of an individual’s, is its 








494 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


character: wherefore he who damages that character, is guilty 
of treason against his country. The only protection which a 
nation, without signing its own shame-warrant, can grant to 
the altars of its religion, is by inflicting the severest punish¬ 
ment on those who dare to violate them. They ought to be 
their own potent safeguard. A dwelling-house is protected by 
its inmates ; and so ought a church to be protected by the 
indwelling of the Spirit whom the eye of Faith beholds there. 

Moreover burglaries naturally work out their own remedy. 
Householders become more vigilant ; the police is improved ; 
the law is strengthened. But, when Faith is shaken, no 
outward force can set it up again as firmly as before; and 
that which rests on it falls to the ground. The outrages 
committed against the visible building of the church, unless 
they are arrested, will also prove hurtful to the spiritual 
Church of Christ. Nine tenths in every nation are unable 
to distinguish between an object and its attributes, between 
an idea and the form in which it has usually been manifested, 
and the associations with which it has ever, and to all 
appearance indissolubly, been connected. Such abstraction, 
even in cultivated minds, requires much watchfulness and 
attention. The bulk of mankind will not easily understand, 
how He, whose house may be plundered with impunity, can 
and ought to be the object of universal reverence, how He 
can be the Almighty. 

I will not speak of the moral corruption which is sure to 
ensue from the decay of religion in a people. Among the 
higher and educated classes, we may have divers specious 
substitutes, in the cultivation of reason and the moral 
affections, the law of honour and of opinion, which may 
preserve a decorous exterior of life, even after the primal 
source of all good in the heart is dried up. But for the 
lower orders Religion is the only guardian and guide, that 
can preserve them from being swept along by blind delusions, 
and the cravings of unsatisfied appetites and passions. If 
they do not fear God, they will not fear King, or Parlia¬ 
ment, or Laws. Whatever does not rest on a heavenly 
foundation will be overthrown. 







GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


495 


Thus, even if a burglary were necessarily to be attended 
by murder, it would be a less destructive crime to society 
than sacrilege. Human life should indeed be sacred, on 
account of the divine spirit enshrined in it. Take away that 
spirit; and it is worth little more than that of any other 
animal. For the sake of any moral principle, of any divine 
truth, it may be sacrificed, and ought to be readily. He 
w T ho dies willingly in such a cause, is not a suicide, but a 
martyr. To deem otherwise is propter mtam, vivendi perdere 
causas. u - 

So diseased are the appetites of those who live in what is 
called the fashionable world, that they mostly account 
Sunday a very dull day, which, with the help of a longer 
morning sleep, and of an evening nap, and of the Parks, and 
of the Zoological Gardens, and of looking at their neighbours’ 
dresses, and at their own, they contrive, as it only comes 
once a week, to get through. Yet of all days it is the one 
on which our highest faculties ought to be employed the 
most vigorously, and to find the deepest, most absorbing 
interest. 

With somewhat of the same feeling do the lovers of 
excitement regard a state of peace. It is so stupid \ there s 
no news : no towns have been stormed, no battles fought. 
We want a little bloodshed, to colour and flavour our lives 
and our newspaper. How dull must it have been at Rome 
when the temple of Janus was shut! The Romans however 
were a lucky people; for that mishap seldom befell them. 

It is sad, that, when so many wars are going on uncea¬ 
singly in all parts of the earth,—the war waged by the mind 
of man against the powers of Nature in the fulfilment of his 
mission to subdue them,—the war of Light against Dark¬ 
ness, of Truth against Ignorance and Errour,—the war of 
Good against Evil, in all its numerous forms, political, social, 
and personal,—it is very sad that we should feel little interest 
in any form, except that which to the well-being of mankind 
is commonly the least important. u. 












496 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 

When I hear or read the vulgar abuse, which is poured 
out if ever a monk or a convent is mentioned, I am reminded 
of what the Egyptian king said to the Israelites : Ye are idle , 
ye are idle: therefore ye say , Let us go and do sacrifice to the 
Lord. To those who know not God, the worship of God is 
idleness. __ 

Idolatry may be a child of the Imagination; but it is a 
child that has forgotten its parent. Idolatry is the worship 
of the visible. It mistakes forms for substances, symbols for 
realities. It is bodily sight, and mental blindness, a 
doting on the outward, occasioned by the want of the poetic 
faculty. So that Religion has suffered its most grievous 
injury, not from too much imagination, but from too little. 


The bulk of mankind feel the reality of this world, but 
have little or no feeling for the reality of the next world. 
They who, through affliction or some other special cause, 
have had their hearts withdrawn from the world for a while, 
and been living in closer communion with God, will some¬ 
times almost cease to feel the reality of this world, and will 
live mainly in the next. The grand difficulty is to feel the 
reality of both, so as to give each its due place in our 
thoughts and feelings, to keep our mind’s eye and our heart’s 
eye ever fixt on the Land of Promise, without looking away 
from the road along which we are to travel toward it. a. 

To judge of Christianity from the lives of ordinary, nominal 
Christians is about as just as it would be to judge of tropic 
fruits and flowers from the produce which the same plants 
might bring forth in Iceland. «• 

The statue of Memnon poured out its song of joy, when 
the rays of the morning sun fell upon it: and thus, when the 
rays of divine Truth first fall on a human soul, it is scarcely 
possible that something like heavenly music should not issue 
from its depths. The statue however was of stone : no 
living voice was awakened in it: the sounds melted and 














■! 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 497 

floated away. Alas that the heavenly music drawn from the 
heart of man should often be no less fleeting than the song 
of Memnon’s statue ! u. 

Seeing is believing , says the proverb ; and most thoroughly 
is it verified by mankind from childhood upward. Though, 
of all our senses, the eyes are the most easily deceived, 
we believe them in preference to any other evidence. We 
believe them against all other testimony, and often, like 
Thomas, will not believe without seeing. Hence the peculiar 
force of the blessing bestowed on those who do not see, and 
yet believe. 

Faith, the Scripture tells us, comes by hearing. For faith is 
an assurance concerning things which are not seen, con¬ 
cerning things which are beyond the power of sight, nay, in 
the highest sense, concerning Him whom no man hath seen, 
and whom His Son, having dwelt in His bosom, has declared 
to us. Its primary condition is itself an act of faith in a 
person, in him who speaks to us \ whereas seeing is a mere 
act of sense. _ u * 

All knowledge, of whatsoever kind, must have a twofold 
groundwork of faith,—one subjectively, in our own faculties, 
and the laws which govern them,—the other objectively, in 
the matter submitted to our observations. We must believe 
in the being who knows, and in that which is known : know¬ 
ledge is the copula of these two acts. Even Scepticism must 
have the former. Its misfortune and blunder is, that it will 
keep standing on one leg, and so can never get a firm footing. 
We must stand on both, before we can walk, although the 
former act is often the more difficult. u * 

Nobody can be responsible for his faith. For how can any 
one help believing what his understanding tells him is true 1 

But all teachers of Christianity have believed the con- 

trary. ... 

That is, because they were all insolent and overbearing, 

and wanted to dogmatize and tyrannize over mankind. Now 


K K 















498 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


however that people are grown honester and wiser, and love 
truth more, they will no longer bow the knee to the 
monstrous absurdities which priestcraft imposed on our poor 
blind ancestors. 

Bravo ! you have hit on the very way of proving that a 
man’s moral character has nothing to do with his faith. 
Plato’s of course had nothing. 

Why! his vanity led him to indulge in all sorts of 
visionary fancies. 

Dominic’s had nothing. 

He was such a bloody ruffian, that he persuaded himself 
he might make people orthodox by butchering them. 

Becket’s had nothing. 

He believed whatever pampered his own ambition, and 
that of the Church. 

Luther’s had nothing. 

His temper was so uncontrolled, he believed whatever 
flattered his passions, especially his hatred of the Pope. 

Voltaire’s had nothing ; nor Rousseau’s ; nor Pascal’s ; nor 
Milton’s ; nor Cowper’s. All these examples,—and thou¬ 
sands more might be added ; indeed everybody whose heart 
we could read would be a fresh one,—prove that what a man 
believes is intimately connected with what he is. His faith 
is shaped by his moral nature, and shapes it. Pour the 
same liquid into a sound and a leaky vessel, into a pure and 
a tainted one, will the contents of the vessels an hour after 
be precisely the same ? 

In fact the sophism I have been arguing against,—mere 
sophism in some, half sophism, half blunder in others,— 
comes from the spawn of that mother-sophism and mother- 
blunder, which would deny man’s moral responsibility 
altogether, on the ground that his actions do not result from 
any cause within the range of his power to determine them 
one way or other, but are wholly the creatures of the 
circumstances he is placed in, and follow the impulses of 
those circumstances with the same passive necessity, with 
which the limbs of a puppet are moved by its wires. u 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


499 


The foundation of domestic happiness is faith in the virtue 
of woman. The foundation of political happiness is faith in 
the integrity of man. The foundation of all happiness, 
temporal and eternal, is faith in the goodness, the righteous¬ 
ness, the mercy, and the love of God. u. 

A loving spirit finds it hard to recognize the duty of pre¬ 
ferring truth to love,—or rather of rising above human love, 
with its shortsighted dread of causing present suffering, and 
looking at things in God’s light, who sees the end from the 
beginning, and allows His children to suffer, when it is to 
work out their final good. Above all is the mind that has 
been renewed with the spirit of self-sacrifice, tempted to 
overlook the truth, when, by giving up its own ease, it can 
for the moment lessen the sufferings of another. Yet, for 
our friend’s sake, self ought to be renounced, in its denials 
as well as its indulgences. It should be altogether forgotten; 
and in thinking what we are to do for our friend, we are not 
to look merely, or mainly, at the manner in which his 
feelings will be affected at the moment, but to consider 
what will on the whole and ultimately be best for him, so 
far as our judgement can ascertain it. a. 

To suppress the truth may now and then be our duty to 
others : not to utter a falsehood must always be our duty to 
ourselves. a. 

A teacher is a kind of intellectual midwife. Many of 
them too discharge their office after the fashion enjoined on 
the Hebrew midwives : if they have a son to bring into the 
world, they kill him ; if a daughter, they let her live. 
Strength is checkt; boldness is curbed; sharpness is blunted; 
quickness is clogged ; highth is curtailed and deprest; elas¬ 
ticity is dampt and trodden down ; early bloom is nipt : 
feebleness gives little trouble, and excites no fears; so it is 
let alone. 

How then does Genius ever contrive to escape and gain a 
footing on this earth of ours. 

k k. 2 









500 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


The birth of Minerva may shew us the way : it springs 
forth in full armour. As the midwives said to Pharaoh, It 
is lively , and is delivered ere the midwives come in. u. 


Homebred wits are like home-made wines, sweet, luscious, 
spiritless, without body, and ill to keep. u. 

If a boy loves reading, reward him with a plaything ; if 
he loves sports, with a book. You may easily lead him to 
value a present made thus, and to shew that he values it by 
using it. _ 

The tasks set to children should be moderate. Over¬ 
exertion is hurtful both physically and intellectually, and 
even morally. But it is of the utmost importance that they 
should be made to fulfill all their tasks correctly and 
punctually. This will train them for an exact, conscientious 
discharge of their duties in after life. u. 

A great step is gained, when a child has learnt that there 
is no necessary connexion between liking a thing and doing 
it. a - 


By directing a child’s attention to a fault, and thus 
giving it a local habitation and a name, you may often fix 
it in him more firmly ; when, by drawing his thoughts and 
affections to other things, and seeking to foster an opposite 
grace, you would be much more likely to subdue it. In like 
manner a jealous disposition is often strengthened, when 
notice is taken of it; while the endeavour to cherish a spirit 
of love would do much toward casting it out. a. 

I saw two oaks standing side by side. The one was 
already clothed in tender green leaves; the other was still 
in its wintry bareness, shewing few signs of reviving life. 
Whence arose this 1 The influences of the sun and air and 
sky must have been the same on both trees : their nearness 
seemed to bespeak a like soil : no outward cause was 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


501 

apparent to account for the difference. It must therefore 
have been something within, something in their internal 
structure and organization. But wait a while : in a month 
or two both the trees will perhaps be equally rich in their 
summer foliage. Nay, that which is slowest in unfolding its 
leaves, may then be the most vigorous and luxuriant. 

So is it often with children in the same family, brought 
up under the same influences : while one grows and advances 
daily under them, another may seem to stand still. But 
after a time there is a change ; and he that was last may 
even become first, and the first last. 

So too is it with God’s spiritual children. Not according 
to outward calculations, but after the working of His grace, 
is their inward life manifested : often the hidden growth is 
unseen till the season is far advanced ; and then it bursts 
forth in double beauty and power. a. 

You desire to educate citizens ; therefore govern them by 
law, not by will. What is individual must be reared in the 
quiet privacy of home. The disregard of this distinction 
occasions much of the outcry of the pious against schools. 
Religion must not be made an engine of discipline. 

A literal translation is better than a loose one ; just as a 
cast from a fine statue is better than an imitation of it. 
For copies, whether of words or things, must be valuable in 
proportion to their exactness. In idioms alone, as a friend 
remarks to me, the literal rendering cannot be the right one. 

Hence the difficulty of translations, regarded as works of 
art, varies in proportion as the books translated are more or 
less idiomatic; for in rendering idioms one can seldom find 
an equivalent, which preserves all the point and grace of the 
original. Hence do the best French books lose so much by 
being transfused into another language : a large part of the 
spirit evaporates in the process. To my own mind, after a 
good deal of experience in this line, no writer of prose has 
seemed so untranslatable as Goethe. In dealing with others, 















502 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


one may often fancy that one has exprest their meaning as 
fully, as clearly, and as forcibly, as they have in their own 
tongue. But I have hardly ever been able to satisfy 
myself with a single sentence rendered from Goethe. There 
has always seemed to be some peculiar aptness in his words, 
which I have been unable to represent. The same dissatis¬ 
faction, I should think, must perpetually weigh upon such 
as attempt to translate Plato ; whom Goethe also resembles 
in this, that the unapproachable beauty of his prose does 
not strike us so much, until we attain to this practical con¬ 
viction how inimitable it is. Bichter presents difficulties to 
a translater, because he exercises such a boundless liberty in 
coining new words, whereas we are under great restraint in 
this respect. In attempting to render the German meta¬ 
physicians, we are continually impeded by the want of an 
equivalent philosophical terminology. But Goethe seldom 
coins words; he uses few uncommon ones : his difficulties 
arise from his felicity in the selection and combination of 
common words. u. 


Of all books the Bible loses least of its force and dignity 
and beauty from being translated into other languages, 
wherever the translation is not erroneous. One version may 
indeed excell another, in that its diction may be more 
expressive, or simpler, or more majestic : but in every version 
the Bible contains the sublimest thoughts uttered in plain 
and fitting words. It was written for the whole world, not 
for any single nation or age; and though its thoughts are 
above common thoughts, they are so as coming straight 
from the primal Fountain of Truth, not as having been 
elaborated and piled up by the workings of Abstraction and 
Reflexion. 

One reason why the translaters of the Bible have been 
more successful than others, is that its language, in the 
earlier and larger half, belongs to that primitive period, 
when the native unity of human thought and feeling was 
only beginning to branch out into diversity and multi¬ 
plicity, when the chief objects of language were the ele- 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


503 


mentary features of outward nature, and of the heart and 
mind, and when the reflective operations of the intellect 
had as yet done little in bringing out those differences and 
distinctions, which come forward more and more as we 
advance further from the centre, thereby diverging further 
from each other, and by the aggregate of which nations as 
well as individuals are severed. Owing to the same cause, 
the language of the Bible has few of those untranslatable 
idiomatic expressions, which grow up and multiply with the 
advance of social life and thought. In the chief part of the 
New Testament on the other hand, a like effect is produced 
by the position of the writers. The language is of the 
simplest elementary kind, both in regard to its nomenclature 
and its structure, as is ever the case with that of those who 
have no literary culture, when they understand what they 
are talking about, and do not strain after matters beyond 
the reach of their slender powers of expression. Moreover, 
as the Greek original belongs to a degenerate age of the 
language, and is tainted with many exoticisms and other 
defects, while our Version exhibits our language in its 
highest purity and majesty, in this respect it has a great 
advantage. 

But does not the language of Homer belong to a nearly 
similar period ? and has any writer been more disfigured 
and distorted by his translaters 1 

True ! The ground of the difference however is plain. 
The translaters of Homer have allowed themselves all 
manner of liberties in trying to shape and fashion and dress 
him out anew after the pattern of their own age, and of 
their own individual tastes j and against this he revolted, as 
the statue of Apollo or of Hercules would against being 
drest out in a coat and waistcoat. Whereas the translaters 
of the Bible were induced by their reverence for the sacred 
text to render it with the most scrupulous fidelity. They 
were far more studious of the matter, than of the manner ; 
and there is no surer preservative against writing ill, or more 
potent charm for writing well. Perhaps, if other trans¬ 
lations had been undertaken on the same principle, and 







504 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


carried on in a somewhat similar reverential spirit, they 
would not have dropt so often like a sheet of lead from the 
press. 

At the same time we are bound to acknowledge it as an 
inestimable blessing, that our translation of the Bible was 
made, before our language underwent the various refining 
processes, by which it was held to be carried to its perfection 
in the reign of Queen Anne. For in those days the 
reverence for the past had faded away; even the power of 
understanding it seemed well-nigh extinct. Tate and Brady’s 
Psalms shew that the Bible would have been almost as much 
defaced and corrupted as the Iliad was by Pope ; though, as 
a translater in verse is always constrained to assume a 
certain latitude, there would have been less of tinsel when 
the translation was in prose. 

Yet the less artificial and conventional state of our lan¬ 
guage in the age of Shakspeare was far more congenial 
to that of the Bible. Hence, when the task of revising our 
translation, for the sake of correcting its numerous inac¬ 
curacies, and of removing its obscurities, so far as they 
can be removed, is undertaken, the utmost care should be 
used to preserve its language and phraseology. u. 

Philology, in its highest sense, ought to be only another 
name for Philosophy. Its aim should be to seek after 
wisdom in the whole series of its historical manifestations. 
As it is, the former usually mumbles the husk, the other 
paws the kernel. n 


Chaos is crude matter, without the formative action of 
mind upon it. Hence its limits are always varying, both in 
every individual man, and in every nation and age. u. 

A truism misapplied is the worst of sophisms. 


One of the wonders of the world is the quantity of idle, 
purposeless untruth, the lies which nobody believes, yet 
everybody tells, as it were from the mere love of lying,—or 















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


505 


as though the bright form and features of Truth could not 
be duly brought out, except on a dark ground of false¬ 
hood. u. 


Not a few Englishmen seem to travel abroad with hardly 
any other purpose than that of finding out grievances. 
Surely such people might just as well stay at home : they 
would find quite enough here. Coelum , non animum, mutant 
qui tram mare currunt. u. 

The most venomous animals are reptiles. The most spite¬ 
ful among human beings rise no higher. Reviewers should 
bear this in mind ; for the tribe are fond of thinking that 
their special business is to be as galling and malicious as 
they can. u. 

Some persons think to make their way through the diffi¬ 
culties of life, as Hannibal is said to have done across the 
Alps, by pouring vinegar upon them. Or they take a lesson 
from their housemaids, who brighten the fire-irons by rubbing 
them with something rough. u. 

Would you touch a nettle without being stung by it ? take 
hold of it stoutly. Do the same to other annoyances ; and 
few things will ever annoy you. u. 

One is much less sensible of cold on a bright day, than on 
a cloudy. Thus the sunshine of cheerfulness and hope will 
lighten every trouble. u. 

Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of the mercury in 
the barometer, indicate little else than the changeableness of 
the weather. u. 

In a controversy both* parties will commonly go too far. 
Would you have your adversary give up his errour ? be 
beforehand with him, and give up yours. He will resist your 
arguments more sturdily than your example. Indeed, if he 















506 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


is generous, you may fear his overrunning on the other 
side : for nothing provokes retaliation, more than concession 
does. u * 


We have all been amused by the fable of the Sun and the 
Wind, and readily acknowledge the truth it inculcates, at 
least in that instance. But do we practise what it teaches ? 
We may almost daily. The true way of conquering our 
neighbour is not by violence, but by kindness. 0 that people 
would set about striving to conquer one another in this way ! 
Then would a conqueror be truly the most glorious, and the 
most blessed, because the most beneficent of mankind. u. 

When you meet a countryman after dusk, he greets you, 
and wishes you Goodnight; and you return his greeting, and 
call him Friend. It seems as though a feeling of something 
like brotherhood rose up in every heart, at the approach of 
the hour when we are all to be gathered together beneath 
the wings of Sleep. In this respect also is Twilight “ studi¬ 
ous to remove from sight Day’s mutable distinctions,” as 
Wordsworth says of her in his beautiful sonnet. All those 
distinctions Death levels ; and so does Sleep. 

But why should we wait for the departure of daylight, to 
acknowledge our brotherhood ? Rather is it the dimness of 
our sight, the mist of our prejudices and delusions, that 
separate and estrange us. The light should scatter these, as 
spiritual light does; and it should be manifest, even out¬ 
wardly, that, if we walk in the light , we have fellowship one 
with another. U. 


Flattery and detraction or evil-speaking are, as the phrase 
is, the Scylla and Charybdis of the tongue. Only they are 
set side by side : and few tongues are content with falling 
into one of them. Such as have once got into the jaws of 
either, keep on running to and fro between them. They who 
are too fairspoken before you, are likely to be foulspoken 
behind you. If you would keep clear of the one extreme, 
keep clear of both. The rule is a very simple one : never 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


507 


find fault with anybody, except to himself; never praise 
anybody, except to others. u. 

Personalities are often regarded as the zest, hut mostly 
are the bane of conversation. For experience seems to have 
ascertained, or at least usage has determined, that personali¬ 
ties are always spiced with more or less of malice. Hence it 
must evidently be our duty to refrain from them, following 
the example set before us by our great moral poet : 

I am not one who much or oft delight 
To season my fireside with personal talk, 

Of friends who live within an easy walk, 

Or neighbours, daily, weekly, in my sight. 

But surely you would not have mixt conversation always 
settle into a discussion of abstract topics. Commonly speak¬ 
ing, you might as well feast your guests with straw-chips and 
saw-dust. Often too it happens that, in proportion as the 
subject of conversation is more abstract, its tone becomes 
harsher and more dogmatical. And what are women to do ? 
they whose thoughts always cling to what is personal, and 
seldom mount into the cold, vacant air of speculation, unless 
they have something more solid to climb round. You must 
admit that there would be a sad dearth of entertainment 
and interest and life in conversation, without something of 
anecdote and story. 

Doubtless. But this is very different from personality. 
Conversation may have all that is valuable in it, and all that 
is lively and pleasant, without anything that comes under 
the head of personality. The house in which, above all others 
I have ever been an inmate in, the life and the spirit and 
the joy of conversation have been the most intense, is a 
house in which I hardly ever heard an evil word uttered 
against any one. The genial heart of cordial sympathy with 
which its illustrious master sought out the good side in every 
person and thing, and which has found an inadequate expres¬ 
sion in his delightful Sketches of Persia, seemed to commu¬ 
nicate itself to all the members of his family, and operated 
as a charm even upon his visiters. For this reason was the 









508 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


pleasure so pure and healthy and unmixt; whereas spiteful 
thoughts, although they may stimulate and gratify our 
sicklier and more vicious tastes, always leave a bitter relish 
behind. 

Moreover, even in conversation whatever is most vivid and 
brightest is the produce of the Imagination,—now and then, 
on fitting occasion, manifesting some of her grander powers, 
as Coleridge seems to have done above other men,—but 
usually, under a feeling of the incongruities and contradic¬ 
tions of human nature, putting on the comic mask of 
Humour. Now the Imagination is full of kindness. She 
could not be what she is, except through that sympathy with 
Nature and man, which is rooted in love. All her appetites 
are for good ; all her aspirations are upward ; all her visions, 
—unless there be something morbid in the feelings, or gloomy 
in past experience, to overcloud them,—are fair and hopeful. 
This is the case in poetry : the deepest tragedy ought to 
leave the assurance on our minds that, though sorrow may 
endure for a night, even for a long, long polar night, joy 
cometh in the morning. Nor is her working different in real 
life. Looking at men’s actions in conjunction with their 
characters, and with the circumstances whereby their cha¬ 
racters have been modified, she can always find something 
to say for them; or, if she cannot, she turns away from 
so painful a spectacle. It is through want of Imagination, 
through the inability to view persons and things in their 
individuality and their relations, that people betake them¬ 
selves to exercising their Understanding, which looks at 
objects in their insulation, and pries into motives, without 
reference to character, and rebukes and abuses what it 
cannot reconcile with its own narrow rules, and can see 
little in man but what is bad. Hence, to keep itself in 
spirits, it would fain be witty, and smart, and would make 
others smart. u. 


What is one to believe of people h One hears so many 
contradictor } 7 stories about them. 

Exercise your digestive functions : assimilate the nutri- 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


509 


tive; get rid of the deleterious. Believe all the good you 
hear of your neighbour ; and forget all the bad. u. 


Sense must be very good indeed, to be as good as good 
nonsense. u. 


Who does not think himself infallible 1 Who does not 
think himself the only infallible person in the world 1 
Perhaps the desire to be delivered from the tyranny of the 
pope within their own breasts, or at least of that within the 
breasts of their brethren, may have combined with the 
desire of being delivered from the responsibility of exer¬ 
cising their own judgement, in making people readier to 
recognize and submit to the Pope on the Seven Hills. At 
all events this desire has been a main impelling motive 
with many of the converts, who in various ages have gone 
back to the Church of Rome. u. 

All sorrow ought to be Heimweh , homesickness. But then 
the home should be a real one, not a hole we run to on find¬ 
ing our home closed against us. u. 

Humour is perhaps a sense of the ridiculous, softened and 
meliorated by a mixture of human feelings. For there 
certainly are things pathetically ridiculous ; and we are hard¬ 
hearted enough to smile smiles on them, much nearer to 
sorrow than many tears. 

If life was nothing more than earthly life, it might be 
symbolized by a Janus, with a grinning Democritus in front, 
and a wailing Heraclitus behind. Such antitheses have not 
been uncommon. One of the most striking is that between 
Johnson and Voltaire. u * 

The craving for sympathy is the common boundary-line 
between joy and sorrow. u. 

Many people hurry through life, fearful, as it would seem, 













510 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


of looking back, lest they should be turned, like Lot’s wife, 
into pillars of salt. Alas too ! if they did look back, they 
would see little else than the blackened and smouldering 
ruins of their vices, the smoking Sodom and Gomorrah of 
the heart. u. 

Tvcodi acavTov, they say, descended from heaven. It has 
taken a long journey then to very little purpose. 

But surely people must know themselves. So few ever 
think about anything else. 

Yes, they think what they shall have, what they shall get, 
how they shall appear, what they shall do, perchance now 
and then what they shall be, but never, or hardly ever, what 
they are. u. 

It is a subtle and profound remark of Hegel’s (Yol. x. 
p. 465), that the riddle which the Sphinx, the Egyptian 
symbol for the mysteriousness of nature, propounds to 
Edipus, is only another way of expressing the command of 
the Delphic Oracle, yva>0i o-eavrov. And, when the answer is 
given, the Sphinx casts herself down from her rock: when 
man does know himself, the mysteriousness of Nature, and 
her terrours, vanish also; and she too walks in the light of 
knowledge, of law, and of love. u. 

The simplicity which pervades Nature results from the 
exquisite nicety with which all its parts fit into one another. 
Its multiplicity of wdieels and springs merely adds to its 
power; and, so perfect is their mutual adaptation and agree¬ 
ment, the effect seems inconceivable, except as the operation 
of a single law, and of one supreme Author of that Law. u. 

The exception proves the rule , says an old maxim, which has 
often been greatly abused. As it is usually brought forward, 
the exception in most cases merely proves the rule to be a 
bad one, to have been deduced negligently and hastily from 
inadequate premisses, and to have overreacht itself. Natu¬ 
rally enough then it is unable to keep hold of that, on which 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


611 


it never laid hold. Or the exception may prove that the 
forms of the Understanding are not sufficiently pliant and 
plastic to fit the exuberant, multitudinous varieties of 
Nature ; who does not shape her mountains by diagrams, or 
mark out the channels of her rivers by measure and line. 

In a different sense however, the exception does not merely 
prove the rule, but makes the rule. The rule of human 
nature, the canonical idea of man is not to be taken as an 
average from any number of human beings : it must be 
drawn from the chosen, choice few, in whom that nature has 
come the nearest to what it ought to be. You do not form 
your conception of a cup from a broken one, nor that of a 
book from a torn or foxt and dog’s-eared volume, nor that of 
any animal from one that is maimed, or mutilated, or 
distorted, or diseased. In every species the specimen is the 
best that can be produced. So the conception of man is not 
to be taken from stunted souls, or blighted souls, or wry 
souls, or twisted souls, or sick souls, or withered souls, but 
from the healthiest and soundest, the most entire and 
flourishing, the straightest, the highest, the truest, and the 
purest. _ u * 

Men ought to be manly : women ought to be womanly or 
feminine. They are sometimes masculine, which men cannot 
be ; but only men can be effeminate. For masculineness 
and effeminacy imply the palpable predominance in the 
one sex, of that which is the peculiar characteristic of the 
other. 

Not that these characteristic qualities, which in their 
proper place are graces, are at all incompatible. The manliest 
heart has often had all the gentleness and tenderness of 
womanhood, nay, is far likelier than the effeminate to have it. 
In the Life of Lessing we are told (i. p. 203,) that, when 
Kleist, the German poet, who was a brave officer, was dis¬ 
contented at being placed over a hospital after the battle of 
Rossbach, Lessing used to comfort him with the passage in 
Xenophon’s Cyropedia, which says that the bravest men are 
always the most compassionate, adding that the eight pilgrims 









512 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


from Bremen and Lubeck, who went out to war against the 
enemy, on their first arrival in the Holy Land took charge of 
the sick and wounded. On the other hand the most truly 
feminine heart, in time of need, will manifest all the strength 
and calm bravery of manhood. Among the many instances 
of this, let me refer to the fine stories of Chilonis, of Agesis- 
trata, and of Archidamia, in Plutarch’s Life of Agis. Thus 
too, amid the miserable spectacle just exhibited by the down¬ 
fall of royalty in France, it is on the heroic fortitude of two 
illustrious women that the eye reposes with comfort and 
thankfulness, the more so because it is known that in both 
cases the fortitude sprang from a heavenly source. In the 
history of the former Revolution also the brightest spots are 
the noble instances of female heroism, arising mostly from 
the strength of the affections. 

That quality however in each sex, which is in some measure 
alien to it, should commonly be kept in subordination to 
that which is the natural inmate. The softness in the man 
ought to be latent, as the waters lay hid within the rock in 
Horeb, and should only issue at some heavenly call. The 
courage in the woman should sleep, as the light sleeps in the 
pearl. 

The perception of fitness is ever a main element in the 
perception of pleasure. What agrees with the order of 
Nature is agreeable; what disagrees with that order is dis¬ 
agreeable. Hence our hearts, in spite of their waywardness, 
and of all the tricks we play with them, still on the whole 
keep true to their original bent. Women admire and love 
in men whatever is most manly. Thus Steffens, in one of 
his Novels (Malkolm ii. p. 12), makes Matilda say: “We 
women should be in a sad case, if we could not reckon with 
confidence on the firmness and steadfastness of men. How¬ 
ever peacefully our life may revolve around the quiet centre 
of our own family, we cannot but be aware that in the wider 
relations of life many things are tottering and insecure, and 
can only be upheld by clearness of insight, by vigorous 
activity, and by manly strength ; without which they would 
fall and injure our own quiet field of action. The place 






GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


513 


which in earlier times the rude or the chivalrous bravery of 
men held in the estimation of women, is now held by firm¬ 
ness of character, by cheerful confidence in action, which 
does not shrink from obstacles, but stands fast when others 
are troubled. The manyheaded monsters which were to be 
conquered of yore, have not disappeared in consequence of 
their bearing other weapons ; and true manly boldness wins 
our hearts now, as it did formerly.’* Hence it was only in a 
morbid, corrupt state of society, that a Wertherian senti¬ 
mentalism could be deemed a charm for the female heart. 
Notwithstanding too all that has been done to pamper the 
admiration of talents into a blind idolatry, no sensible 
woman would not immeasurably prefer steadiness and manli¬ 
ness of character to the utmost brilliancy of intellectual gifts. 
Indeed she who gave up herself to the latter, without the 
former, would soon feel an aching want. Othello’s wooing 
of Desdemona is still the way to the true female heart. 

On the other hand that which men love and admire in 
women, is whatever is womanly and feminine, that of which 
we see such beautiful pictures in Imogen and Cordelia and 
Miranda, in 

The gentle lady married to the Moor, 

And heavenly Una with her milkwhite lamh. 

Among a number of proofs of this I will only mention the 
repugnance which all men feel at the display of a pair of 
blue stockings. 

One of the few hopeful symptoms in our recent literature 
is, that this year (1848) has been opened by two such beautiful 
poems as the Saint's Tragedy and the Princess; in both of 
which the leading purpose, though very differently treated, 
is to exhibit the true idea and dignity of womanhood. In 
the latter poem this idea is vindicated from the perversions 
of modern rhetorical and sensual sophistry; in the former, 
from those of the rhetorical and ascetical sophistry of the 
middle ages, not however with the idle purpose of assailing 
an exploded errour, but because this very form of errour has 
lately been reviving, through a sort of antagonism to the 
other. In a year when so many frantic delusions have been 








514 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


spreading with convulsive power, casting down thrones, dis¬ 
solving empires, uprooting the whole fabric of society, it is a 
comfort to find such noble assertions of the true everlasting 
ideas of humanity. u. 

What should women write 1 

hat which they can write, and not that which they 
cannot. This is clear. They should only write that which 
they can write well, that which accords with the peculiar 
character of their minds. For thus much I must be allowed 
to assume,—it would take too long here to argue the point, 
—that, as in their outward conformation, and in the offices 
assigned to them by Nature, and as in the bent and tone of 
their feelings, so in the structure of their minds there is a 
sexual distinction. Some persons deny this; those, for 
instance, who are delighted at hearing that the minds of all 
mankind, and of all womankind too, are sheets of white 
paper, and who think the easiest way of building a house is 
on the sand, where they shall have no obstacles to level and 
remove in digging for the foundations ; those again who are 
incapable of mounting to the conception of an originating 
power, and who cannot move a step, unless they can support 
themselves by taking hold of the chain of cause and effect; 
those who, themselves being the creatures of circumstances, 
or at least being unconscious of any power in themselves to 
withstand and controll and modify circumstances, are natu- 
rally prone to believe that every one else must be a similar 
hodge-podge. But as the whole history of the world is 
adverse to such a notion, as under every aspect of society it 
exhibits a difference between the sexes, varying indeed, to a 
certain extent, according to their relative positions, but 
markt throughout by a pervading analogy, which is reflected. 
from the face of actual life by an unbroken series of images 
in poetry from the age of Homer down to Tieck and Tenny¬ 
son, there is no need of combating an assertion, deduced from 
an arbitrary hypothesis, by the very persons who are loudest 
in proclaiming that there is no ground of real knowledge 
except facts. 









GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


515 


Now to begin with poetry,—according to the precedence 
which has always belonged to it in the literature of every 
people,—some may incline to fancy that, while prose, from 
its connexion with speculation, and with action in the whole 
sphere of public life, belongs especially to men, poetry is 
rather the feminine department of literature. Yet, being 
askt many years ago why a tragedy by a lady highly admired 
for her various talents had not succeeded, I replied,—though, 
I trust, never wanting in due respect to that sex which is 
hallowed by comprising the sacred names of wife and sister 
and mother,—that there was no need to seek for any further 
reason, beyond its being written by a woman. For of all 
modes of composition none can be less feminine than the 
dramatic. They who are to represent the great dramas of 
life, the strife and struggle of passions in the world, should 
have a consciousness of the powers, which would enable 
them to act a part in those dramas, latent within them, 
and should have some actual experience of the conflicts of 
those passions. They also need that judicial calmness in 
giving every one his due, which we see in Nature and in 
History, but which is utterly repugnant to the strong 
affectionateness of womanhood. A woman may indeed write 
didactic dialogues on the passions, as Johanna Baillie has 
done with much skill ; but these are not tragedies. Nor is 
epic poetry less alien from the genius of the female mind. 
So that, of the three main branches of poetry, the only 
feminine one is the lyrical,—not objective lyrical poetry, 
like that of Pindar and Simonides, and the choric odes of the 
Greek tragedians,—but that which is the expression of 
individual, personal feeling, like Sappho’s. Of this class we 
have noble examples in the songs of Miriam, of Deborah, of 
Hannah, and of the Blessed Virgin. 

The same principle will apply to prose. What women 
write best is what expresses personal, individual feeling, or 
describes personal occurrences, not objectively, as parts of 
history, but with reference to themselves and their own 
affections. This is the charm of female letters : they alone 
touch the matters of ordinary life with ease and grace. 


l l 2 








516 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Men’s letters may be witty, or eloquent, or profound ; but. 
when they have anything beyond a mere practical purpose, 
they mostly pass out of the true epistolary element, and 
become didactic or satirical. Cowper alone, whose mind had 
much of a feminine complexion, can vie with women in 
writing such letters as flow calmly and brightly along, 
mirroring the scenes and occupations of common life. In 
Bettina Brentano’s there is an empassioned lyrical eloquence, 
which is often worthy of Sappho, with an exquisite naivety 
peculiarly her own. Rahel’s, with a piercing intuitive dis¬ 
cernment of reality and truth, which is peculiarly a female 
gift, have an almost painful subtilty in the analysis of 
feelings, which was forced into a morbid intensity, partly by 
her position as a Jewess, in the midst of a community where 
Jews were regarded with hatred and contempt, and partly 
by the acutest nervous sensitiveness, the cause of excru¬ 
ciating sufferings prolonged through years. 

Memoirs again, when they do not meddle with the 
intrigues of politics and literature, but confine themselves 
to a simple affectionate narrative of what has befallen the 
authoress and those most dear to her, are womanly works. 
Of these we have a beautiful example in those of the 
admirable Lucy Hutchinson ; and there is a pleasing grace 
in Lady Fanshawe s. Madame Larochejacquelein’s also are 
delightful; but these, I have understood, were made up out 
of her materials by Barante. 

Moreover, as women can express earthly love, so can they 
express heavenly love, with an entire consecration of every 
thought and feeling, such as men, under the necessity which 
presses on them of being troubled about many things , can 
hardly attain to ; as we see for instance in the writings of 
Santa Teresa, of St Catherine of Sienna, of Madame Guyon. 

Books on the practical education of children too, and 
story-books for them, such as Miss Lamb’s delightful Stories 
of Mrs Leicester's School, lie within the range of female 
authorship. 

But what say you to female novels ? 

Were I Tarquin, and the Sibyl came to me with nine 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


517 


wagonloads of them, I am afraid I should allow her to burn 
all the nine, even though she were to threaten that no others 
should ever be forthcoming hereafter. One may indeed 
meet now and then with happy representations of female 
characters and of domestic manners, as in Miss Austen’s 
novels, and in Frederika Bremer’s. But the class is by no 
means a healthy one. Novels which are works of poetry,— 
novels which transport us out of ourselves into an ideal 
world, another, yet still the same,—novels which represent 
the fermenting and contending elements of human life and 
society,—novels which, seizing the follies of the age, dig 
down to their roots,—novels which portray the wayward¬ 
nesses and self-delusions of passion,—may hold a high rank 
in literature. But ordinary novels, which string a number 
of incidents, and a few common-place pasteboard characters, 
around a love-story, teaching people to fancy that the main 
business of life is to make love and to be made love to, 
and that, when it is made, all is over, are almost purely 
mischievous. When we build castles, they should be in the 
air. When we indulge in romantic dreams, they should lie 
in the realms of romance. It is most hurtful to be wishing 
to act a novel in real life, most hurtful to fancy that the 
interest of life resides in its pleasures and passions, not in 
its duties ; and it mars all simplicity of character to have 
the feelings and events of common life spread out under a 
sort of fantasmagoric illumination before us. u. 


Written in the Album of a lady, who, on my saying one 
evening , I was not well enough to read, replied, “ Therefore you 
will be able to write something for me.” 

You cannot read . . therefore, I pray you, write : 

The lady said. Thus female logic prances : 

From twig to twig, from bank to bank it dances, 

Heedless what unbridged gulfs may disunite, 

The object from the wish. In wanton might, 

Spring-like, you tell the rugged skeleton, 

That bares its wiry branches to the sun, 

Thou hast no leaves . . therefore with flowers grow bright. 
Therefore l Fair maiden’s lips such word ill suits. 

From her it only means, I will , I wish. 












518 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


She scorns her pet,—unless he puts on hoots, 

Straight plunges through the water at the fish, 

Nor lets I dare not wait upon I would: 

For what’s impossible must sure be good. 

Therefore! With soft, bright lips such words ill suit. 
Man’s hard, clencht mouth, whence words uneath do slip, 
May wear out stones with its slow ceaseless drip. 

But ye who play on Fancy’s hope-strung lute, 

Shun the dry chaff that chokes and strikes her mute. 

Yet grieve not that ye may not cleave the ground, 

And hunt the roots out as they stray around : 

’Tis yours to cull the blossoms and the fruit. 

Therefore could never yet link earth to heaven : 

Therefore ne’er yet brought heaven down on earth. 

Where therefore dies, Faith has its deathless birth : 

To Hope a sphere beyond its sphere is given : 

And Love bids therefore stand aside in awe, 

Is its own reason, its own holy law. 

1834. 


Female education is often a gaudy and tawdry setting, 
which cumbers and almost hides the jewel it ought to bring 
out. A . 


Politeness is the outward garment of goodwill. But many 
are the nutshells, in which, if you crack them, nothing like 
a kernel is to be found. a 


With what different eyes do we view an action, when it is 
our own, and when it is another’s ! a. 


We seldom do a kindness, which, if we consider it rightly, 
is not abundantly repaid; and we should hear little of in¬ 
gratitude, unless we were so apt to exaggerate the worth of 
our better deeds, and to look for a return in proportion to 
our own exorbitant estimate. a. 

A girl, when entering on her teens, was observed to be 
very serious; and, on her aunt’s asking her whether any¬ 
thing was the matter, she said, she was afraid that reason 
was coming. 

One might wish to know whether she ever felt equally 
serious, after it had come. If so, she differed from most of 
her own sex, and from a large part of the other. But the 















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


519 


shadows in the morning and evening are longer than at 
noon. 


Eloquence is speaking out...out of the abundance of the 
heart,—the only source from which truth can flow in a pas¬ 
sionate, persuasive torrent. Nothing can be juster than 
Quintilian’s remark (x. 7, 15), “Pectus est, quod disertos 
facit, et vis mentis : ideoque imperitis quoque, si modo sint 
aliquo affectu concitati, verba non desunt.” This is the 
explanation of that singular psychological phenomenon, 
Irish eloquence ; I do not mean that of the orators merely, 
but that of the whole people, men, women, and children. 

It is not solely in the Gospel that people go out into the 
desert to gape after new spiritual incarnations. They have 
sometimes been sought in moral deserts, often in intel¬ 
lectual. 


The book which men throw at one another’s head the 
oftenest, is the Bible ; as though they misread the text 
about the Kingdom of Heaven, and fancied it took people, 
instead of being taken, by force. 

Were we to strip our sufferings of all the aggravations 
which our over-busy imaginations heap upon them, of all 
that our impatience and wilfulness embitters in them, of all 
that a morbid craving for sympathy induces us to display to 
others, they would shrink to less than half their bulk ; and 
what remained would be comparatively easy to support. «. 

In addition to the sacrifices prescribed by the Law, every 
Israelite was permitted to make freewill-offerings, the only 
limitation to which was, that they were to be according as 
the Lord had blest him. What then ought to be the 
measure of our freewill-offerings ? ought they not to be 
infinite ? € - 


Many persons are so afraid of breaking the third com- 












520 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


mandment, that they never speak of God at all; and, to 
make assurance doubly sure, never think of Him. 

Others seem to interpret it by the law of contraries ; for 
they never take God’s name except in vain. So apt too are 
people to indulge in self-delusions, that many of these have 
rankt themselves among the stanch friends and champions 
of the Church. u. 


On ne se gene pas dans cette vie : on ne se presse pas 
pour l’autre. u. 

A sudden elevation in life, like mounting into a rarer 
atmosphere, swells us out, and often perniciously. u. 


What would become of a man in a vacuum % All his 
members would bulge out until they burst. This is the 
true image of anarchy, whether political or moral, intel¬ 
lectual or spiritual. We need the pressure of an atmosphere 
around us, to keep us whole and at one. u. 

Pantheism answers to ochlocracy, and leads to it; pure 
monotheism, to a despotic monarchy. If a type of trini- 
tarianism is to be found in the political world, it must be a 
government by three estates, tria juncta in uno. u. 


A strong repugnance is felt now-a-days to all a priori 
reasoning ; and to call a system an a priori system is deemed 
enough to condemn it. Let the materialist then fall by his 
own doom. For he is the most presumptuous a priori 
reasoner, who peremptorily lays down beforehand, that the 
solution of every intellectual and moral phenomenon is to 
be sought and found in what comes immediately under the 
cognisance of the senses. xj. 


What is sansculotterie, or the folly of the descamisados, but 
man’s stripping himself of the fig-leaf ? He has forgotten 
that there is a God, from whom he needs to hide himself; 
and he prostitutes his nakedness in the eyes of the world. 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


521 


Thus it is a step in the process, which is ever going on, 
where it is not counteracted by conscience and faith, of 
bestializing humanity. u - 

It is a favorite axiom with our political economists,—an 
axiom which has been far more grossly abused by the 
exaggerations and misapplications of its advocates, than it 
ever can be by the invectives of its opponents,—that the 
want produces the supply. In other words, poverty produces 
wealth; a vacuum produces a plenum. 

Now nei/ia, it is true, in the Platonic Fable, is the mother 
of "Epcos. But she is not the mother of ilopos. On the 
contrary it is, when impregnated by Ilopos, that she brings 
forth "Epcas, who then, according to the chorus of the Birds, 
may become the parent of all things. This Greek fable, 
which is no less superior to the modern system in profound 
wisdom than in beauty, will enable us to discern the real 
value of the above-mentioned axiom, and the limits within 
which it is applicable, and at the same time to expose the 
fallacy involved in its extension beyond those limits. 

Want is an ambiguous term. It means mere destitution; 
and it means desire : it may be equivalent to Ilevia, or to 
* Epcos- These two senses are often confounded; or a logical 
trickster will slip in one instead of the other. Mere 
destitution cannot produce a supply : of itself it cannot even 
produce a desire. There is no necessity by which our being 
without a thing constrains us to wish for it. We are 
without wings; but this does not make us want to have 
them ; nor would such a want cause a pair to shoot out of 
our shoulders. The wishing-cap of Fortunatus belongs to 
the cloud-land of poetical, or to the smoke-land of philo¬ 
sophical dreamers. 

The wants which tend to produce a supply, are of two 
kinds, instinctive and artificial. The former seek after that, 
a desire of which has been implanted in us by Nature; the 
latter after that, which we have been taught to desire by 
experience. Thus, in order that "Epaw should spring from 
n €V ta, it is necessary that she should have been overshadowed 











522 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


by n opo 9 , either consciously or unconsciously. The light 
must enter into the darkness, ere the darkness can know 
that it is without light, and open its heart to desire and 
embrace it. 

Even with reference to Commerce, from which our axiom 
has been derived, we may see that, though the want, when 
created, tends to produce a supply, there must have been a 
supply in the first instance to produce the want. Thus in 
England at present few articles of consumption are deemed 
more indispensable than potatoes and tea ; and vast exertions 
are employed in supplying the want of them. But everybody 
knows that these wants are entirely artificial, and that they 
were produced gradually, and very slowly by the introduction 
of these articles, which now rank among the prime necessaries 
of our economical life. 

If we take the principle we are speaking of in this, its 
right sense, it has indeed been very widely operative, in the 
moral and intellectual, as well as in the physical history of 
man. In fact it is only the witness borne by the whole 
order of Nature to the truth of the divine law, that they 
who seek shall find. Our constitution, and that of the 
world around us, have been so exquisitely adapted to each 
other, that not only did they harmonize at the first, but 
all the changes and varieties in the one have called forth 
corresponding changes and varieties in the other. It is 
interesting to trace the adjustments by which accidental 
deficiencies are remedied, to observe how our bodily frame 
fits itself to circumstances, and seems almost to put forth new 
faculties, when there is need of them. The blind learn, as 
it were, to see with their ears ; the deaf, to hear with their 
eyes. Let both these senses be taken away : the touch 
comes forward and assumes their office. In like manner the 
physical characters of men, in different stages of society are 
modified and moulded by the wants which act on them. 
Savages, for example, have a strength and sharpness of per¬ 
ception, which in civilized life, being no longer needed, wears 
away. 

Thus, if a want is of such a kind as to give rise to a 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


523 


demand, it will produce a supply, or some sort of substitute 
for it. In other words, the nature and extent of the supply 
will depend in great measure on the nature and extent of 
the demand. But when the same axiom is applied, as it 
often has been* to prove the uselessness of those great na¬ 
tional institutions, which are designed to elevate and to 
hallow our nature,—when it is contended, for instance, that 
our Universities are useless, because the want of knowledge 
will produce the best supply, without the aid of any endow¬ 
ments or privileges conferred or sanctioned by the State,— 
or that the want of religion will produce an adequate supply, 
without a national Establishment,—the ground is shifted; 
and the argument, if pusht to an extreme, would amount to 
this, that omnia jlunt ex niliilo. 

Here is a double paralogism. It is true indeed, as I have 
admitted above, that, if a want be felt, so as to excite a 
desire and a demand, it will produce a supply of some sort 
or other. This however is itself the main difficulty with 
regard to our intellectual and moral, above all, our spiritual 
wants, to awaken a consciousness and feeling of them, and a 
desire to remove them. Where a certain degree of supply 
exists, such as that of knowledge in the educated classes of 
society, custom and shame and self-respect will excite a 
general demand for a somewhat similar amount of know¬ 
ledge. But, if it is to go beyond those limits in any 
department, it can only be through the influence of persons 
who have attained to a higher eminence; so that here too 
the supply will precede the demand. On the other hand 
they who have had any concern with the education of the 
lower classes, will be aware of the enormous power which the 
vis inertiae possesses in them, and what strong stimulants 
are required to counteract it. As to our spiritual wants, 
though they exist in all, they are so feeble in themselves, 
and so trodden under foot and crusht by our carnal appetites 
and worldly practices, you might as well expect that a field 
of corn, over which a regiment of cavalry has been galloping 
to and fro, will rise up to meet the sun, as that of ourselves 
we shall seek food for our spiritual wants. Even when the 









524 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Bread of Life came down from heaven, w T e turned away from 
it, and rejected it. Even when He came to His own, His own 
received Him not . 

Moreover, if we suppose a people to have become in some 
measure conscious of its intellectual and its spiritual w^ants, 
so that an intellectual and spiritual demand shall exist 
among them, they in whom it exists will be very ill fitted to 
judge of the quality of the supply which they want. They 
may distinguish between good tea and bad, between good 
wine and bad, though even that requires some culture of the 
perceptive faculty. But with regard to knowledge, especially 
that of spiritual truth, they will be at the mercy of every 
impudent quack, unless some determinate provision is made 
by the more intelligent part of the nation, whereby the 
people shall be supplied with duly qualified guides and 
instructors. 

That such institutions, like everything else here on earth, 
are liable to corruption and perversion, I do not deny. Even 
solar time is not true time. But correctives may be devised; 
and in all such institutions there should be a power of modi¬ 
fying and adapting themselves to new wants that may spring 
up. This however would lead me too far. I merely wisht 
to point out the gross fallacy in the argument by which such 
institutions are impugned, u. 

The main part of the foregoing remarks was written many 
years ago, on being told by a friend, that he had heard the 
argument here refuted urged as quite conclusive against our 
Universities and our Church-establishment, by certain Scotch 
philosophers of repute. The fallacy seemed to me so glaring, 
that I could hardly understand how any persons, with the 
slightest habit of close thinking, could fail to detect it. 
Hence I was a good deal surprised at reading in a newspaper 
several years after, that Dr Chalmers, in the Lectures which 
he delivered in London in 1838, had complained at great 
length and with bitterness, of some one who had purloined 
this reply to the economical argument from him, and who 
had deprived him of the fame of being the discoverer. As 











GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


525 


these Lectures are printed in the collection of his Works, 
this complaint must have been greatly mitigated, and is 
degraded into a note. Honour to the great and good man, 
who, having been bred and trained in an atmosphere charged 
with similar sophisms, was the first, as it would seem, to 
detect this mischievous one, or at least to expose it! But 
surely, of all things, the last in which we should lay claim to 
a monopoly or a patent, is truth. Even in regard to more 
recondite matters, it has often been seen that great dis¬ 
coveries have, so to say, been trembling on the tongue of 
several persons at once ; and he who has had the privilege 
of enunciating them, has merely been the Flugelman in the 
army of Knowledge. If others utter a truth, which we fancy 
we have discovered, at the same time with ourselves, or soon 
after, and independently, we should not grudge them their 
share in the honour, but rather give thanks for such a 
token that the discovery is timely, that the world was ready 
for it, and wanted it, and that its spies were gone out to 
seek it. u. 


Amo , or some word answering to it, is given in the gram¬ 
mars of most languages as an example of the verb ; perhaps 
because it expresses the most universal feeling, the feeling 
which is mixt up with and forms the key-note of all others. 
The disciples of the selfish school indeed acknowledge it only 


in its reflex form, 
instance would be : 
Je m’aime. 
Tu t’aimes. 
II s’aime. 


If one of them wrote a grammar, his 


Nous nous aimons. 

Yous vous aimez. 

Ils s’aiment. 

Yet the poor simple Greeks did not know that cpiXeiv would 
admit of a middle voice. u. 


The common phrase, to be in love , well expresses the im¬ 
mersion of the soul in love, like that of the body in light. 
Thus South says, in his Sermon On the Creation (vol. i. p. 44): 
“ Love is such an affection, as cannot so properly be said to 
be in the soul, as the soul to be in that.” u. 














526 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Man cannot emancipate himself from the notion that the 
earth and everything on it, and even the sun, moon, and 
stars, were made almost wholly and solely for his sake. Yet, 
if the Earth and her creatures are made to supply him with 
food, he on his part is made to till the Earth, and to prepare 
and train her and all her creatures for the fulfilment of their 
appointed works. If he would win her favours, he must woo 
her by faithful and diligent service. There should be a per¬ 
petual reciprocation of kind offices. As the Earth shared in 
his Fall,'so is she to share in his redemption, waiting, with 
all her creatures, in earnest expectation for the manifestation 
of the sons of God. At present, if he often treats her 
insultingly and domineeringly, the Earth in revenge has the 
last word, and silences and swallows him up. u. 

Two streams circulate through the universe, the stream of 
Life, and the stream of Death. Each feeds, and feeds upon 
the other. For they are perpetually crossing, like the ser¬ 
pents round Mercury’s Caduceus, wherewith animas ille evocat 
Oreo Pallentes , alias sub Tartara tristia mittit. They began 
almost together ; and they will terminate together, in the 
same unfathomable ocean ; after which they will separate, 
and take contrary directions, and never meet again. u. 


If roses have withered, buds have blown : 

If rain has fallen, winds have dried : 

If fields have been ravaged, seeds are sown : 

And Wordsworth lives, if poets have died. 

For all things are equal here upon earth : 

’Tis the ashes of Joy that give Sorrow her birth : 
And Sorrow’s dark cloud, after louring awhile, 

Or melts, or is brightened by Hope to a smile. 

Where the death-bell tolled, the merry chime rings : 
Where waved the cypress, myrtles spread : 

When Passion is drooping, Friendship springs. 

And feeds the Love which Fancy bred. 


The consummation of Heathen virtue was exprest in the 
wish of the Roman, that his house were of glass : so might 
all men behold every action of his life. The perfection of 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


527 


Christian goodness is defined by the simple command, which 
however is the most arduous ever laid upon man, not to let 
the left hand know what the right hand does. For the 
eye which overlooks the Christian, is the eye which sees in 
secret, and which cannot be deceived, the eye which does 
not need glass as a medium of sight, and which pierces into 
what no glass can reveal. u. 

Hardly any dram is so noxious as praise; perhaps none : 
for those whom praise corrupts, might else have#wrought 
good in their generation. Like Tarquin, it cuts off the 
tallest plants. Be sparing of it therefore, ye parents, as ye 
would be of some deadly drug : withhold your children from 
it, as ye would from the flowers on the brink of a precipice. 
Whatsoever you enjoin, enjoin it as a duty ; enjoin it because 
it is right; enjoin it because it is the will of God ; and always 
without reference to what man may say or think of it. 
Reference to the opinion of the world, and deference to the 
opinion of the world, and conference with it, and inference 
from it, and preference of it above all things, above every 
principle and rule and law, human or divine,—all this will 
come soon enough without your interference. As easily 
might you stop the east wind, or check the blight it bears 
along with it. Ask your own conscience, reader ; probe your 
heart; walk through its labyrinthine chambers ; and trace 
the evils you feel within you to their source : do you not 
owe the first seeds of many of your moral diseases, and the 
taint which cankers your better feelings, to your having 
drunk too deeply of this delicious poison ? 

At first indeed it may seem harmless. The desire of 
praise seems to be little else than the desire of approbation : 
and by what lodestar is a child to be guided, unless by the 
approving judgement of its parent 1 But, although their 
languages on the confines are so similar as scarcely to be 
distinguishable, you have only to advance a few steps, and 
you will find that you are in a forein country, happy if you j 
discover it to be an enemy’s, before you become a captive. 
Approbation speaks of the thing or action : That is right. 











528 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


What you have done is right. Praise is always personal. It 
begins indeed gently with the particular instance, You have 
done right; but it soon fixes on lasting attributes, and passes 
from You are right, through You are a good child , You are a 
nice child, You are a sweet child, to that which is the cruelest 
of all, You are a clever child. For God in His mercy has 
hitherto preserved goodness from being much fly-blown and 
desecrated by admiration. People who wish to be stared at, 
seldom try hard to be esteemed good. Vanity takes a 
shorter and more congenial path : and the fruit of the Tree 
of Knowledge is still, in a secondary way, one of the baits 
which catch the greatest number of souls. When a child 
has once eaten of that fruit, and been told that it is worthy 
to eat thereof, it longs for a second bite ; not however so 
much from any strong relish for the fruit itself, as from the 
hope of renewing the pleasing titillations by which the first 
mouthful had been followed. This longing in time becomes 
a craving, the craving a gnawing ravenousness : nothing is 
palatable, save what pampers it; but there is nothing out 
of which it cannot extract some kind of nourishment. 

Yet, alas! it is on this appetite that we rely, on this 
almost alone, for success, in our modern systems of Educa¬ 
tion. We excite, stimulate, irritate, drug, dram the pupil, 
and then leave him to do what he pleases, heedless how soon 
he may break down, so he does but start at a gallop. 
Nothing can induce a human being to exert himself, except 
vanity or jealousy : such is our primary axiom ; and our 
deductions are worthy of it. Emulation, emulation, is the 
order of the day, Emulation in its own name, or under an 
alias as Competition : and only look at the wonders it has 
effected : it has even turned the hue of the Ethiop’s skin : it 
has set all the blacking-mongers in England emulating and 
competing with each other in whitewashing every wall 
throughout the country. Emulation is declared to be the 
only principle we can trust with safety: for principle it is 
called: although it implies the rejection and denial of all 
principle, of its efficacy at least, if not of its existence, and is 
a base compromise between principle and opinion, in which 








GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


529 


the things of eternity are made to bow down before the way¬ 
ward notions and passions of the day. Nay, worse, this 
principle, or no-principle, is adopted as the main spring and 
motive in a scheme of National, and even of Religious Educa¬ 
tion, by the professing disciples of the Master who declared, 
that, if any man desires to be first, he shall be last, and 
whose Apostle has numbered Emulation among the works of 
the flesh , together with adultery, idolatry, hatred, strife, and 
murder. We may clamour as we will about the unchristian 
practices of the Jesuits : the Jesuits knew too much of 
Christianity, ever to commit such an outrage against its 
spirit, as to make children pass through the furnace of the 
new Moloch, Emulation.* 

But let me turn from these noisy vulgar paradoxes, to 
look at wisdom in her quiet gentleness, as in Wordsworth’s 
sweet language she describes the growth of her favorite, 

A maid whom there were none to praise, 

And very few to love. 

The air of these simple words, after the hot, close atmosphere 
I have been breathing, is as soft and refreshing as the touch 
of a rose-leaf to a feverish cheek. The truth however, so 
exquisitely exprest in them, was equally present to persons 
far wiser than our system-makers, the authors of our popular 
tales. The beautiful story of Cinderella, among others, 
shews an insight into the elements of all that is lovely in 
character, seldom to be paralleled in these days. 

Ought not parents and children then to be fond of each 
other ? 

You, who can interrupt me with such a question, must 
have a very fond notion of fondness. Whatever is peculiar 
in fondness, whatever distinguishes it from love, is faulty. 
Fondness may dote and be foolish: Love is only another 
name for Wisdom. It is the Wisdom of the Affections, as 

* This was written in 1826. Since then the worship of Emulation has 
been assailed in many quarters ; and the system of our National Schools 
has been improved. Still the idol has not yet been cast down ; and what 
was true in matter of principle then, is just as true now. 









530 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


Wisdom is the Love of the Understanding. Fondness may 
flatter and be flattered : Love shrinks from flattery, from 
giving or receiving it. Love knows that there are things 
which are not to be seen, that there are things which are not 
to be talkt of; and it shrinks equally from the thought of 
polluting what is invisible by its gaze, and of profaning what 
is unutterable by its prattle. Its origin is a mystery : its 
essence is a mystery : every pulsation of its being is mys¬ 
terious : and it is aware that it cannot break the shell, and 
penetrate the mystery, without destroying both itself and its 
object.* For the cloud, which is so beautiful in the distance, 
when the sunbeams are sleeping on its pillow, if you go too 
near and enter it, is only dank and dun : you find nothing, 
you learn nothing, except that you have been trickt. Often 
have we been told that Love palls after fruition ; and this is 
the reason. When it has pluckt off its feathers for the sake 
of staring at them, it can never sew them on again : when 
it is swinish, it is in a double sense guilty of suicide. Its 
dwelling is like that of the Indian God on the lotus, upon 
the bosom of Beauty, rising out from the playful waters of 
feelings which cannot be fixt : and it cannot turn up the 
lotus to look under it, -without oversetting and drowning 
itself; it cannot tear up its root, to plant it on the firm 

Since the above was written, I have met with the same thoughts in a 
pamphlet written by Passow, the excellent lexicographer, during the 
controversy excited by the attempt to introduce gymnastic exercises as an 
instrument of education, “ If our love for our country is to be sincere, 
without ostentation and affectation, it cannot be produced immediately by 
instruction and directions, like a branch of scientific knowledge. It must 
rest, like every other kind of love, on something unutterable and incom¬ 
prehensible. Love may be fostered : it may be influenced by a gentle 
guidance from afar : but, if the youthful mind becomes conscious of this, 
all the simplicity of the feeling is destroyed ; its native gloss is brusht off. 
Such too is the case with the love of our country. Like the love for our 
parents, it exists in a child from the beginning ; but it has no permanency, 
and cannot expand, if the child is kept, like a stranger, at a distance from 
his country. No stories about it, no exhortations will avail, as a sub¬ 
stitute we must see our country, feel it, breathe it in, as we do Nature. 
Ihen history may be of use, and after a time reflexion, consciousness. 
But our first care ought to be for institutions, in which the spirit of our 
country lives, without being uttered in words, and takes possession of 
men s minds involuntarily. For a love derived from precepts is none • ” 
Turnziel , p. 142. 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


531 


ground of scientific conviction, but it withers and dies. Such 
as love wisely therefore, cherish the mystery, and handle the 
blossom delicately and charily ; for so only will it retain its 
amaranthine beauty. 

There is no greater necessity for a father’s or mother s love 
to vent itself in bepraising their child, than for the child’s 
love to vent itself in bepraising its father and mother. The 
latter is too pure and reverential to do so : why should the 
former be less reverential h Or can any object be fitter to 
excite reverence, than the spirit of a child, newly sent forth 
from God, in all the loveliness of innocence, with all the 
fascination of helplessness, and with the secret destinies of 
its future being hanging like clouds around its unconscious 
form 1 On the contrary, as, the less water you have in your 
kettle, the sooner it begins to make a noise and smoke, so is 
it with affection : the less there is, r the more speedily it 
sounds, and smokes, and evaporates, talking itself at once out 
of breath and into it. Nay, when parents are much in the 
habit of showering praises on their children, it is in great 
measure for the sake of the pleasing vapour which rises upon 
themselves. For the whirlpool of Vanity sucks in whatever 
comes near it. The vain are vain of everything that belongs 
to them, of their houses, their clothes, their eye-glasses, the 
white of their nails, and, alas ! even of their children. 

Equally groundless would be the notion that children need 
to be thus made much of, in order to love their parents. 
Such treatment rather weakens and shakes affection. For 
there is an instinct of modesty in the human soul, that 
instinct which manifests itself so beautifully by enabling us 
to blush; and, until this instinct has been made callous by 
the rub of life, it cannot help looking distrustfully on praise. 
Thus Steffens, in his Malkolm (i. p. 379), represents a hand¬ 
some, manly boy, whom a number of ladies treated with 
vociferous admiration, caressing and kissing him, and calling 
him a lovely child, quite an angel. “ But he was very much 
annoyed at this, and at length tore himself away impatiently, 
prest close to his mother, and complained aloud and vexa- 
tiously : Why do they kiss and caress me so? I cant bear it” 








532 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


A beautiful contrast to this is supplied by Herder’s recollec¬ 
tions of his father, as related by his widow ( Erinnerungen aus 
Herders Leben, i. p. 17). “When he was satisfied with me, 
his face grew bright, and he laid his hand softly on my head, 
and called me Gottesfriede ( God's peace : his name was Gott¬ 
fried). This was my greatest, sweetest reward.” This 
exemplifies the distinction drawn above between praise and 
approbation. 

The very pleasure occasioned by praise is of a kind which 
implies it to be something unexpected and forbidden, and not 
more than half deserved. Besides, as I have already said, 
the habit of feeding on it breeds such an insatiable hunger, 
that even a parent may in time grow to be valued chiefly as 
ministering to the gratification of this appetite. Hence 
would spring a state like that described by Robert Hall in 
his sermon on Modem Infidelity (p. 38): “ Conceive of a 
domestic circle, in which each member is elated by a most 
extravagant opinion of himself, and a proportionable contempt 
of every other, is full of little contrivances to catch 
applause, and, whenever he is not praised, is sullen and dis¬ 
appointed.” 

Affection, to be pure and durable, must be altogether 
objective. It may indeed be nurst by the memory of 
benefits received ; but it has nothing to do with hope, except 
the hope of intercourse and communion, of interchanging 
kind looks and words, and of performing kind deeds. What¬ 
ever is beside this, is not love, but lust, it matters not of 
what appetite, nor whether of the body or of the mind u 


What a type of a happy family is the family of the Sun ! 
With what order, with what harmony, with what blessed 
peace, do his children the planets move around him, shining 
with the light which they drink in from their parent’s face 
at once on him and on one another ! ’ 


How great is the interval between gambolingand gambling. 
One belongs to children, the other to grown up people. If 
an angel were looking on, might he not say? Is this what 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


533 


man learns from life 1 Was it for this that the father of anew 
generation was preserved from the waters of the Flood ? u. 

0 that old age were truly second childhood ! It is seldom 
more like it than the berry is to the rosebud. 

Few things more vividly teach us the difference between 
the living objects of Nature and the works of man’s con¬ 
trivance, than the impressions produced, when, after a lapse 
of years, we for the first time revisit the home of our child¬ 
hood. On entering the old house, how strangely changed 
does everything appear ! We look in vain for much that our 
fancy, uncheckt by the knowledge of any other world than 
that immediately around, had pictured to itself; and we turn 
away in half incredulous disappointment, as we pass from 
room to room, and our memory calls up the various events 
connected with them. It almost seems to us as though, 
while our minds have been expanding at a distance, the 
familiar chambers and halls must have been growing narrower, 
and are threatening, like the prison-tomb in Eastern story, to 
close upon all the joys of our childhood, and to crush them 
for ever. 

But, when we quit the house of man’s building, and seek 
for fellowship with the past among the living, boundless 
realities of Nature, all that we had lost is regained; and 
we find how faithful a guardian angel she has been, and how 
richly she restores us a hundredfold the treasures we had 
committed to her keeping. The waters of the peaceful 
river, winding through the groves where the child delighted 
to wander, speak to us in the same voice now, in which they 
spoke then; and, while we listen to them, the confiding 
lilies upborne no less lovingly on their bosom, than when in 
early days we vainly tried to tear them from it, are an 
emblem of the happy thoughts which we had cast upon them, 
and which they have preserved for us until we come to 
reclaim them. The bright kingfisher darting into the river 
recalls our earliest visions of beauty; and the chorus of 
birds in the groves seem not only to welcome us back, but 













534 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


also to reawaken the pure melodies of childhood in its holiest 
aspirations. In like manner, as we walk under the deep 
shade of the stately avenues, the whisperings among the 
branches seem to flow from the spirits of the place, giving 
back their portion of the record of our childish years; and 
we are reminded of the awe with which that shade imprest 
us, and of the first time we felt anything like fear, when, on 
a dark evening, the sudden cry of the screech-owl taught us 
that those trees had other inhabitants, beside the birds to 
which we listened with su<& delight by day. 

Thus the whole of Nature appears to us full of living 
echoes, to which we uttered our hopes and joys in childhood, 
though the sound of her response only now for the first time 
reaches our ears. Everywhere we, as it were, receive back 
the tokens of a former love, which we had too long forgotten, 
but which has continued faithful to us. Hence we shall 
return to our work in the world with a wiser and truer 
heart, having learnt that this life is indeed the seed-time for 
eternity, and that in all our acts, from the simplest to the 
highest, we are sowing what, though it may appear for a 
time to die, only dies to be quickened and to bear fruit. e. 

May we not conceive too, that, if a spirit, after having 
past through the manifold pleasures and cares and anxieties 
and passions and feverish struggles of this mortal life, and 
been removed from them by death, were to revisit this home 
of its antemortal existence, it would in like manner shrink in 
amazed and sickening disappointment from the narrow, petty, 
mean, miserable objects of all its earthly aims and con¬ 
tentions, and would at the same time be filled with wonder 
and adoration, as it contemplated the infinite wisdom and 
j love, manifested both in the whole structure and order of 
the Divine Purposes, and in their perfect correspondence to 
its own imperfectly understood wants and desires ? u. 


As well might you search out a vessel’s path 
Amid the gambols of the dancing waves, 

Or track the lazy footsteps of a star 
Across the blue abyss, as hope to trace 












GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


535 


The motions of her spirit. Easier task 
To clench the bodiless ray, than to arrest 
Her airy thoughts. Flower after flower she sips, 

And sucks their honied fragrance, nor bedims 
Their brightness, nor appears to spoil their stores ; 

And all she lights on seems to grow more fair. 

Fuller, in his Good Thoughts in Worse Times, has a passage 
on Ejaculations, in which he introduces the foregoing image 
so prettily, that I will quote it. “ The field wherein bees 
feed is no whit the barer for their biting. When they have 
taken their full repast on flowers or grass, the ox may feed, 
the sheep fat, on their reversions. The reason is, because 
those little chemists distill only the refined part of the 
flower, leaving the grosser substance thereof. So ejacu¬ 
lations bind not men to any bodily observance, only busy 
the spiritual half, which maketh them consistent with the 
prosecution of any other employment.” u. 

When we are gazing on a sweet, guileless child, playing in 
the exuberance of its happiness, in the light of its own starry 
eyes, we are tempted to deny that anything so lovely can 
have a corrupt nature latent within; and we would gladly 
disbelieve that the germs of evil are lying in these beautiful 
blossoms. Yet, in the tender green of the sprouting night¬ 
shade, we can already recognize the deadly poison, that is to 
fill its ripened berries. Were our discernment of our own 
nature, as clear as of plants, we should probably perceive the 
embryo evil in it no less distinctly. g- 

A little child, on first seeing the Thames, and being told 
it was a river, cried, No, it can't be a river : it must be a pond. 
His notion of a river had been formed from a little brook 
near his home ; and the largest surface of water he was 
familiar with was a pond. Happy will it be for that child, 
if, when all his notions are modified by long experience, he 
still retains such simplicity and reverence for the past, as to 
maintain the claim of the little brook to the name, which, 
he once supposed, especially belonged to it. 

In the infancy of our spiritual consciousness how much do 













536 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


we resemble this child ! Every thought and feeling, in the 
little world in which our spirits move, becomes all-important : 
each “single spot is the whole earth” to us : and every¬ 
thing beyond is judged of by its correspondence to what 
goes on within it. If we perceive anything in others 
different from what we deem to be right, we are apt to 
exclaim, like the little child, that it cannot be right or true : 
and thus our minds grow narrow and exclusive, at the very 
time when they have received the first impulse toward their 
enlargement. Such a state requires much gentleness and 
forbearance from those who are more advanced in their 
course, and have learnt to mistrust themselves more, and to 
look with more faith for the good around them, whatever its 
form may be. For the mind, when it is first “ putting forth 
its feelers into eternity,” is peculiarly sensitive, and needs to 
be led gradually, and to be left much to the workings of its 
own experience. If it is met repulsively, by an assumption 
of superior wisdom, it may either be driven back into a 
mere worship of self, in its various petty modes and forms ; 
or, should the person be of a bolder temper, he will cast off 
all faith in that, which he once accounted so precious, and, 
instead of recognizing the germ of manhood in his infant state, 
and waiting for its gradual development, will be tempted to 
deny that there was any kind of life or light in it. 

If, in the birth and growth of the outward man, the im¬ 
perfect substance is so sacred in the eyes of Him who forms 
it, that all our members are written in His book, and that 
He looks not at what it is in its imperfection, but at what it 
is to be in its perfection, how infinitely more precious and 
sacred should we esteem the development of the inner man ! 
with what love and reverence should we regard each 
member, however imperfect at first, and shelter it from 
everything that might check or distort its growth ! € . 

It is a scandal that the sacred name of Love should be 
given by way of eminence to that form of it, which is 
seldomest found pure, and which very often has not a 
particle of real love in it. „ 
















GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


537 


In those hotbeds of spurious, morbid feelings, senti¬ 
mental novels, we often find the lover, as he is misnamed, 
after he has irreparably wronged and ruined his mistress, 
pleading that he was carried along irresistibly by the 
violence of his love : and I am afraid that such pictures are 
only representations of what occurs far more frequently in 
actual life. Not that this absolves the writers. For, 
instead of allaying and healing the disease, they irritate and 
increase it. They would even persuade the victim of it that 
it is inevitable, nay, that it is an eruption and symptom of 
exuberant health. If however there be any case, in which 
it is plain that Violence is only Weakness grown rank, the 
bastard brother of Weakness, it is this. Such love is not 
the etherial, spiritual, self-consuming, self-purifying flame, 
but the darkling, smouldering one, that spits forth sparks of 
light amid volumes of smoke, being crusht and almost 
extinguisht by the damp, black, crumbling load of the 
sensual appetites. So far indeed is sensual love from being 
the same thing with spiritual love, that it is the direct 
contrary, the hellish mask in which the fiend mimics and 
mocks it. For, while the latter enjoins the sacrifice of self 
to its object, and finds a ready obedience, the former is 
ravenous to sacrifice its object to self. u. 

“ It is strange (says Novalis) that the real ground of 
cruelty is lust.” The truth of this remark flasht across me 
this morning, as I was looking into a bookseller s window, 
where I saw Illustrations of the Passion of Love standing 
between two volumes of a History of the French Revolution. 
The same connexion is pointed out by Baader in his Philo¬ 
sophical Essays (i. p. 100). “This impotence of the spirit of 
lies, his inability to realize himself or come into being, is the 
cause of that inward fury, with which, in his bitter destitu¬ 
tion and lack of all personal existence, he seizes, or tries to 
seize upon all outward existences, in order to propagate him¬ 
self in and with them, but with and in all, being merely a 
destroyer and devourer, like a fierce flame, only brings forth 
a new death and new hunger, instead of the sabbatical rest 















538 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


of the completed, successful manifestation and incarnation. 
Hence the real spirit and purpose of murder and lust is one 
and the same, in every stage of being.” Again, in another 
passage, he says (p. 192) : “He who is not for Me is against 
Me ; and where the spirit of love does not dwell, there dwells 
the spirit of murder. This is proved even by those mani¬ 
festations of sin or hatred, which seem the furthest removed 
from the desire of destruction or murder; as for instance in 
the ease with which the impulse of lust transforms itself into 
that of murder, whether the latter displays itself merely 
physically, or psychically, in what the French call perdre les 
femmes .” The same terrible affinity is exprest by Milton in 
his catalogue of the inmates of hell. 

Next Chemos, the obscene dread of Moab’s sons.— 

Peor his other name, when he enticed 
Israel in Sittim, on their march from Nile, 

To do him wanton rites, which cost them woe. 

Yet thence his lustful orgies he enlarged 

Even to that hill of scandal, by the grove 

Of Moloch homicide ; lust hard by hate. u. 


What is meant by Universal Philanthropy ? Love requires 
that its object should be something real, something positive 
and definite ; as is proved by all mythologies, in which the 
attributes of the Deity are impersonated, to satisfy the 
cravings of the imagination and of the heart : for the abstract 
God of philosophy can never excite anything like love. I 
can love this individual, or that individual; I can love a 
man in all the might of his strength and of his weakness, in 
all the blooming fulness of his heart, and all the radiant glory 
of his intellect: I can love every particular blossom of feel¬ 
ing, every single ray of thought: but the mere abstract, 
bodiless, heartless, soulless notion, the logical entity, Man, 
“ sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” affords 
no home for my affections to abide in, no substance for them 
to cling to. 

But, although reality and personality are essential to him 
whom we are to regard with affection, bodily presence is by 
no means necessary to the perception of reality and person¬ 
ality. Vain and fallacious have been the quibbles of those 










GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


539 


sophists, who have contended that no action can take place, 
unless the agent be immediately, that is, as they understand 
it, corporeally present. Homer and Shakspeare have not 
ceast to act, and will not so long as the world endures. N or 
does this action at all depend on the presence of their works 
before us. They cannot put forth all the energies of their 
genius, until they have purged themselves from this earthly 
dross, and become spiritual presences in the spirit. For 
nothing can act but spirit: matter is unable to effect any¬ 
thing, save by the force it derives from something spiritual. 
The golden chains, by which Anaxagoras fabled that the sun 
was made fast in the heavens, are only a type of that power 
of Attraction, or, to speak at once more poetically and more 
philosophically, of that power of golden Love, which is the 
life and the harmony of the universe. 

True love is not starved, but will often be rather fed and 
fostered, by the absence of its object. In Landor’s majestic 
language, in the Conversation between Kosciusko and 
Poniatowski, “ Absence is not of matter : the body does not 
make it. Absence quickens our love and elevates our affec¬ 
tions. Absence is the invisible and incorporeal mother of 
ideal beauty.” Love too at sight, the possibility of which 
has been disputed by men of drowthy hearts and torpid 
imaginations, can arise only from the meeting of those 
spirits which, before they meet, have beheld each other in 
inward vision, and are yearning to have that vision 
realized. u * 


Life has two ecstatic moments, one when the spirit catches 
sight of Truth, the other when it recognizes a kindred spirit. 
People are for ever groping and prying around Truth; but 
the vision is seldom vouchsafed to them. We are daily 
handling and talking to our fellow-creatures; but rarely do 
we behold the revelation of a soul in its naked sincerity and 
fervid might. Perhaps also these two moments generally 
coincide. In some churches of old, on Christmas Eve, two 
small lights, typifying the Divine and the Human Nature, 
were seen to approach one another gradually, until they met 












540 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


and blended, and a bright flame was kindled. So likewise it 
is when the two portions of our spiritual nature meet and 
blend, that the brightest flame is kindled within us. When 
our feelings are the most vivid, our perceptions are the most 
piercing; and when we see the furthest, we also feel the 
most. Perhaps it is only in the land of Truth, that spirits 
can discern each other; as it is when they are helping each 
other on, that they may best hope to arrive there. u. 


The loss of a friend often afflicts us less by the momentary 
shock, than when it is brought back to our minds some time 
afterward by the sight of some object associated with him in 
the memory, of something which reminds us that we have 
laught together, or shed tears together, that our hearts have 
trembled beneath the same breeze of gladness, or that we 
have bowed our heads under the same stroke of sorrow. So 
may one behold the sun sink quietly below the horizon, with¬ 
out leaving anything to betoken that he is gone ; while the 
sky seems to stand unconscious of its loss, unless its chill 
j blueness in the East be interpreted into an expression of dis- 
j may. But anon rose-tinted clouds,—call them rather streaks 
of rosy light,—come forward in the West, as it were to 
announce the promise of a joyous resurrection. u. 


There are days on which the sun makes the clouds his 
chariot, and travels on curtained behind them. Weary of 
shining before a drowsy thankless world, he covers the glory 
of his face, but will not quite take away the blessing of his 
light; and now and then, as it were in pity, he withdraws 
the veil for a moment, and looks forth, to assure the earth 
that her best friend is still watching over her in the heavens; 
like those occasional visitations by which the Lord, before 
the birth of the Saviour, assured mankind that he was still 
their God. TT 


Nothing is further than Earth from Heaven i nothing is 
nearer than Heaven to Earth. u 














GUESSES AT TRUTH. 541 

I will close this Volume with the following Ode to Italy, 
written by my Brother nearly thirty years ago, in November 
1818 . What would then have been deemed a very bold, rash 
guess, may now perhaps be regarded as a prophecy about to 
receive its fulfilment. The interest which every scholar, every 
lover of poetry and art, every reverent student of history, must 
feel in the fate of Italy, was deepened in my brother by his 
having been born at Rome. 

ITALY. 

Strike the loud harp ; let the prelude he, 

Italy, Italy ! 

That chord again, again that note of glee . . 

Italy, Italy ! 

Italy ! 0 Italy ! the very sound it charmeth; 

Italy ! 0 Italy ! the name my bosom warmeth ; 

High thoughts of self-devotions, 

Compassionate emotions, 

Soul-stirring recollections, 

With hopes, their bright reflexions, 

Rush to my troubled heart at thought of thee, 

My own illustrious, injured Italy. 

Dear queen of snowy mountains, 

And consecrated fountains, 

Within whose rocky heaven-aspiring pale 
Beauty has fixt a dwelling 
All others so excelling, 

To praise it right, thine own sweet tones would fail, 

Hail to thee ! Hail! 

How rich art thou in lakes to poet dear, 

And those broad pines amid the sunniest glade 
So reigning through the year, 

Within the magic circle of their shade 
No sunbeam may appear ! 

How fair thy double sea ! 

In blue celestially 

Glittering and circling !—but I may not dwell 
On gifts, which, decking thee too well, 

Allured the spoiler. Let me fix my ken 
Rather upon thy godlike men, 

The good, the wise, the valiant, and the free, 

On history’s pillars towering gloriously, 

A trophy reared on high upon thy strand, 

That every people, every clime 
May mark and understand, 

What memorable courses may be run, 

What golden never-failing treasures won, 

From time, 

In spite of chance, 

And worser ignorance, 



542 


GUESSES AT TRUTH. 


If men be ruled by Duty’s firm decree, 

And Wisdom bold her paramount mastery. 

What art thou now ? Alas ! Alas ! 

Woe, woe! 

That strength and virtue thus should pass 
From men below ! 

That so divine, so beautiful a Maid 
Should in the withering dust be laid, 

As one that—Hush ! who dares with impious breath 
To speak of death ? 

The fool alone and unbeliever weepeth. 

We know she only sleepeth; 

And from the dust, 

At the end of her correction, 

Truth hath decreed her joyous resurrection : 

She shall arise, she must. 

For can it be that wickedness has power 
To undermine or topple down the tower 
Of virtue’s edifice ? 

And yet that vice 

Should be allowed on sacred ground to plant 
A rock of adamant ? 

It is of ice, 

That rock, soon destined to dissolve away 
Before the righteous sun’s returning ray. 

But who shall bear the dazzling radiancy, 

When first the royal Maid awaking 
Darteth around her wild indignant eye, 

When first her bright spear shaking, 

Fixing her feet on earth, her looks on sky, 

She standeth like the Archangel prompt to vanquish, 
Yet still imploring succour from on high ! 

0 days of wearying hopes and passionate anguish, 
When will ye end ! 

Until that end be come, until I hear 

The Alps their mighty voices blend, 

To swell and echo back the sound most dear 
To patriot hearts, the cry of Liberty, 

I must live on. But when the glorious Queen 
As erst is canopied with Freedom’s sheen, 

When I have prest, with salutation meet, 

And reverent love to kiss her honoured feet, 

I then may die, 

Die how well satisfied ! 

Conscious that I have watcht the second birth 
Of her I’ve loved the most upon the earth, 

Conscious beside 

That no more beauteous sight can here be given : 
Sublimer visions are reserved for heaven. 









INDEX. 


*** The Publishers are indebted to Major Pears for ldndly permitting 
them to print this Index from one in manuscript which he had 
prepared for his own use. 


Absence —different effect of—as to 
the works of Nature and those of 
Man, 533 

Abuse and use, 147 
“Abuse I would use,” 92 
“Actio,” full and restricted mean¬ 
ings of, 382 

Actions, double source of, 18 
Affliction, use of, 13 ; in Christians 
and in others, 473 
Age lays open the character, 482 
“Ages of Faith,” 159, 161 
Ajax’s prayer, 255 
Ambition, 23 ; none in heaven, 151, 
428 

Amo—why given as an example in 
grammars, 525 
Amphion, story of, 484 
Ancients—Greeks and Eomans con¬ 
founded under this title, 78 ; 
animal and sensuous life of, 171 ; 
understood by us better than by 
themselves, 454 

Annoyances and nettles, to be 
handled firmly, 505 
Anthropomorphism, 202 
Appetite, use and abuse of, 427 
Approbation, 527 
A priori reasoning, 520 
Archery, a lesson from, 289 
Architecture, Christian and Greek, 
285 

Arguments, good and bad, 156 ; 

truth in bad, 157 
Argus, story of the dog, 420 
Aristocracy, 136, 174 
Aristotle, the best commentator on 
Shakspeare, 182 


Art, and science the expounders of 
Nature, 33 ; mere, perverts taste, i 

339 

Artificiality, 380 
Association (of ideas), 173 
Atheism, 26, 472 
Atonement, 482 
Augustine quoted, 233 
Autos-da-fe within ourselves desir¬ 
able, 470 

Avignon, incident at, 465 

Baader quoted, 537 
Bacon, 145 ; quoted, 9, 26, 58, 59, 
308 

Beatitudes of Matthew and Luke, 
254 

Beautifying glass, 412 

Beauty, 77, 355, 370; power of, 

340 ; and expression, 429 ; and j 
truth lost by severing what God 1 
has joined, 470 

Bees suck but do not spoil, 535 
Begging pardon, begging the ques¬ 
tion, 152 
Bentham, 142 

Bible, translations of the, 502 ; mis¬ 
use of the, 519 

Bigotry, 481 ; and scepticism, 464 
Biography, 256 

“ Blessed are they that weep,” 236 
Blind, the, need leading, 424 
Blindness, 231 
Blossom and fruit, 340 
Body, rights of the, 476 
Books, judgment of, 412 ; which ' 
most profitable and most loved, 
439 ; of one thought, 465 
















544 


INDEX. 


Brilliant speakers or writers, a cau¬ 
tion for, 347 

“Broad stone of honour,” 157, 161 
Brotherhood, human, 506 
Brown, Sir Thomas, quoted, 467 
Butler, Bishop, quoted, 475 
Byron, 400 

Caesar, Julius, quoted, 182 
Calvinism, 151 

Capital punishment, threat of, in¬ 
jurious, 80 

Carlyle and Sterling, 384 
Catholic religion, 339 
Chalmers, Dr. 524 
Changes, in a household or in the 
state, 4 ; political, 174; not 
agreeable, 427 
Chaos, 504 

Character, to judge of, 199; one sure 
standard of, 412; how carried, 
412 

“ Charity begins at home,” 175 
Childhood, 253 ; spiritual, to be 
gently treated, 535 
Children, turn to the light, 153 ; 
their tone in reading, 155 ; how 
to be rewarded, 500; how to be 
tasked, 500 ; a needful lesson for, 
500 ; their faults, how to be cor¬ 
rected, 500 ; unequal growth of, 
500 

Christian ministry, argument for a 
learned, 9 ; candour, 153 ; writers 
of various times and countries com¬ 
pared, 299 

Christianity, 146, 147 ; and Pagan¬ 
ism, virtues of, 1; its threaten- 
ings tangible, promises not so, 3 ; 
means employed in its first estab¬ 
lishment, 9 ; various aspects of, 
298 ; its effect upon literature, 
68; the great civilizer, 339; com¬ 
monly preceded by Judaism or 
Platonism, 339 ; not to be judged 
by the lives of Christians, 496 
Christmas, 10 

Church, and ministry, 224; robbery 
in a, 491 

Cicero quoted, 94, 446; and Plato, 
442 

Civilization, 154; tends to barbar¬ 
ism, 441; an evil result of, 476 
Clergy and laity, 225 


Close boroughs, and forty shilling 
freeholders, 77 
Clouds and sunshine, 173 
Coast, view of, 4 
Cobbett, 98, 378; quoted, 206 
Cobweb on a knocker, 231 
Cobwebs, 466 

Cock-crow, the hour of death, 420 
Coleridge, 168, 227 ; quoted, 155, 
186, 448; on Shakspeare, 183 
Colonization, 83 
Commandment, the third, 519 
Commerce, 12 
Compliments, 153 
Compulsion in religion, 431 
Concession in argument, 505 
Confidence, 147, 199 
Congruity, essential to beauty, 285 
Connoisseurship, 138 
Conscience and reason superseded by 
the understanding, the conse¬ 
quence, 77 

Constitution-mongers, 73, 74, 76 
Contrast, 150 

Controversy, effect of concession in, 
505 

Convents, vulgar abuse of, 496 
Conversation, 507 
Corruption, human, 535 
“Count Julian,” author of, 48 
Courage, 170, 17'2; and faith, 26; 

moral, 471 
Cousin, 453 
Cowper, 211 

Creation, folly of reviling the works 
of, 251 

Crimes and vices, 470 
Criminals, 79 

Criticism, English, 188; the most 
beneficial kind, 357 
Critics, 10; modern, 249 
Curiosity, 31 

Custom, absurd adherence to old, 91 

D’Alembert, quoted, 8 
Dante and Homer, 67 
Dead, authority of the, 174 
Death, 4 ; of a friend, 540 
Death’s doings, 167 
Deformity, personal, its effect upon 
character, 405 

De Maistre, quoted, 170, 235 
“ Demand produces supply,” fallacy 
in the saying, 521 










INDEX. 


545 


Democracy, 169, 464; tendency of, 79 
Demosthenes, apophthegm of, 381 
Deserts, new incarnations often sought 
in, 519 

Detraction and flattery, 506 
Devil and swine, 146 
Differences and likenesses, 284 
Difficulties, how surmounted by 
some, 505 

Digestion, mental, 508 
Diodorus Siculus quoted, 51 
Discipline, 474 

Disgrace, from without, and self- 
inflicted, 181 
Disinterestedness, 169 
Do and have done, 355 
Doctrine, effect of evil, 147 
Donne quoted, 125 
Dress, 253 

Dryden’s epigram on Milton, 334 
Duels, 489 

Dunged field, smell of, 190 
Duty above all consequences, 488 

Earnestness, a proof of sincerity, 15 
Earth, and man must reciprocate 
services, 526 ; conceivable effect of 
revisiting after death, 534 
Ease in writing, 150 
Eclecticism, 444, 446, 456; and true 
philosophy, 447, 452 
Economy, 229 

Education, 10, 499; female, 79, 
518; and instruction, 222; one 
defect of modern, 253; true prin¬ 
ciple of, 379 

Edwardes, Herbert, quoted, 278 
Elevation, effect of, 520 
Eloquence, and grandiloquence, 347; 

Irish, 519 
Emulation, 528 
Enclosing, 479 

Encoring a piece of music justified, 
417 

Encyclopaedia, 431 
End and means, 181 
England and Greece compared, 72 ; 
and France, 150 

English, a peculiarity of the, 150; 
constitution, 174; various styles of 
writing, viz. Scotch, English, Irish- 
English, &c. 219; individuality of 
character among, 413; travellers, 
505 


Enlightenment, modern, 179 
Enthusiasm, 1 

Epigrams, infelicitous on great men, 

335 

Epistles, the apostolical, 199 
Epithets, use and abuse of, 348 
Error, contagious, 169 • 

Erskine, saying of, 456 
Essence and extract, 286 
Establishments, necessity for national, 

523 

Evangelization, 85 

Evans’ censure on Socrates, remarks 
on, 420 

Events, learning from and judging 
from, 78 

Evil, natural bias to, in man, 13; 
and good, 173; speaking and hear¬ 
ing, 175; and good, where to be 
looked for and dwelt on, 251; 
doing that good may come, 427; 
of the world no excuse for with¬ 
drawing from it, 483 
Example, 231 

“Exception proves the rule,” abuse i 
of the maxim, 510 

Faces, 480 
Failures in life, 150 
Faith, 423, 497; and courage, 26; 
entire if true, 198; Christian, 
484; no one responsible for his, 

497 

Fearless men, 290 

Feeling, and opinion, 176; wayward, 
speaking in the language of its 
opposite, 384 
Female, 105 
Fickleness in women, 8 
Fine passages in a book, 441 
Flattery and detraction, 506 
Folk, 104 

Folly, 182; is always right, 427 
Fondness not love, 529 
Forms, 169, 174 
Fox, George, quoted, 123 
Fragmentary writing, 284 
Freedom and independence, 459 
Free-thinkers and free-thinking, 464 
French Revolutions, 72; character, 

72, 482; ditto, symbolised by 
French rivers, 426; phrases in 
English writing, 202; and Eng¬ 
lish characteristics, 287; want of 


N N 

















546 


INDEX. 


individuality among, 413, 414; 
beauty, 429 

Friend, true value of a, never known, 
473; loss of a, 540 
Friendship, 27; and malice, 163; 

the duty of, 499 
Full cup, 230 
Fuller, quoted, 94, 535 

Gamboling and gambling, 532 
Genius, never satisfied with the out¬ 
ward expression of its conceptions, 
57; unpopularity of, 137; com¬ 
pared to a pie of blackbirds, 340; 
and goodness, analogous, 190 ; 
and nature, analogous, 189; and 
talent, 371; unconscious of its ex¬ 
cellence, 384 
Gentleman, defined, 152 
German literature, 186; modern 
drama, some absurdities of, 397 ; 
philosophy, 451 

Ghost seers, political and philosophi¬ 
cal, 177 

God, his gifts to man, 234; denial 
of, 236 ; vile motive to love, 236 ; 
his work perfect, 423; his name 
taken in vain, 520 
Godliness, 254 
Godly, promises to the, 232 
Goethe, 69, 387; English criticisms 
upon, 379; difficulty of translat¬ 
ing, 501 

Gold, a good cover for blemishes, 
480 

Good, and evil, 174; from evil, 174; 
and bad in the world’s estimation, 
difference between, 177; actions, 
God to have the glory of, 424; 
men, errors of, 472 
Goodness, difference between Chris¬ 
tian and heathen, 423; like the 
glow-worm, 427 

Gospel, and law, 165; influence of, 
172; preceded by some rays of 
truth in heathen forms of religion, 
419 

Government, 227, 228; and adminis¬ 
tration, 223 

Governors and governed, 178 
Grace of God, 424 
“ Graeculus esuriens,” 173 
Gratification and happiness, 197 
Great men, 469; compared to moun¬ 


tains, 18, 179; in history how 
few, 290 

Great works seldom popular, 410 
Greatness, vulgar notion of, 232; 
simplicity of, 489 

Greece and England compared, 72; 
poetry of, 149 

Greek poets, 40; literature, 62 ; 
effect of sea and mountain scenery 
upon, 63; poets and historians 
were soldiers and statesmen, 64; 
their clearness of vision, 65 
Growth, in good and in evil, 483; 
physical, intellectual, spiritual, 
501 

Guides may go astray, 489 

Habit, power of, 427, 474 
Hall, Robert, quoted, 532 
Handsomeness, 31 

Happiness, foundations of domestic, 
of political, of eternal, 499; do¬ 
mestic, 532 
Hare, Augustus, 168 
Hatred of those we have injured, 176 
Hazlitt on Shakspeare, 189 
Head and heart, 7 
Heart, like a melting peach, 190; 
stunned and erring, prayer for 
guidance, 483 

Heaven, preparation for, 475; and 
earth, 540 

Heber, Reginald, 168; quoted, 154 
Hedge, a star shining through a, 165 
Hegel, quoted, 114, 510 
Hell, 236 

Hermann, quoted, 466 
Heroism and genius, 289 
“Hie Rhodus, hie salta,” 429 
History and poetry, which is truer ? 
255; style of modern, 428; a 
qualification for writing, 428 
Hobbes, 142 

Home, 234; sickness, 509 
Homer, 38; and Dante, 67; trans¬ 
lations of, 503 
Honour, 7, 174 
Horn, Francis, quoted, 69 
Human nature, 174, 293 ; imperfec¬ 
tion, 247 

Humility, 167; false, 252 
Humour, 341, 509 











INDEX. 


547 


I, 94, 128, 132; “and my king,” 
109 

Ideal, and real, 340; the true, is no 
abstraction, but the individual 
freed and purified, 430 
Ideas, 285 ; and notions, 285 
Idolatry, 22, 496; sundry kinds of, 
163; a kind of, 471 
“If roses have withered,” &c. 526 
Ignorance, easily scandalised, 250 ; 

to be conciliated, 250 
Illustrations, 465 

Imagination, and feelings, truths of, 
178 ; migrations of the, 285 ; as 
needful to the philosopher as to 
the poet, 435 ; needful to religion, 
496 

Imaginative works, general opinion 
of, ultimately right, presently 
wrong, 407 

Incarnation of Christ, 22 
Incongruities, 367 

Independence, 473 ; and freedom, 
459 

Individual, 105 

Individuality, decay of, among the 
English, 102 ; of character among 
the English, 413 

Indulgence to children, is self-indul¬ 
gence, 151 

Infallibility of self, 509 
Infancy, 15 ; of the soul, 482 
Infection, moral, 147 
Ingratitude, mistaken talk of, 518 
Inquisition and autos-da-fe within 
ourselves necessary, 470 
Instincts of the mind, 179 
Institutions, abandonment and re¬ 
storation of, 23 ; power of ances¬ 
tral, 228 

Instruction an element of education, 
379 

Intellect, uncontrolled and unpuri¬ 
fied, 476 

Intentions, good, 173 
Irony, use of, sanctioned by the 
Scriptures, 244 

Irregulars, value of, in literature, 
283 

“Italy,” an ode, 541 

Jacobinism, 31, 126 
Jealousy, 138 


John the Baptist and Christ, oppo¬ 
site sides of one tapestry, 251 
Johnson, 457 ; his couplet on Shak- 
speare, 337 ; his criticism on 
Milton, 353 

Jokes, often accidental, 16 ; good 
and bad, 156 ; one should not 
laugh hastily at one’s own, 376 
Jonah’s gourd, 468 
Joseph’s bones, fable of, 421 
Joyful faces, 13 

Judgment, of men’s actions, 92 ; 

excuse for uncharitable, 254 
Juliet, 27 

Kant quoted, 150 

Kindness, 230 ; conquest by, 506 ; 

mostly well repaid, 518 
Kindred spirit, recognition of, 539 
Kites, real and paper, 347 
Knowledge, 153 ; acquisition of con¬ 
trolled by God’s providence, 60; 
modern teachers of, 80; and 
imagination, first delights of, 287 ; 
progress of, 466 ; of divine things 
is but partial, 339 ; grounded on 
faith, 497 

Landor, W. S. quoted, 11, 149, 
170, 348, 539 

Language, 148, 208, 214, 222 ; a 
barometer, 148 
Latin, 218 
Laughter, 236 

Law, and gospel, 165 ; human and 
divine compared, 252 ; and slavery, 
252 

“ Le monde c’est moi,” 428 
Learning, 144 
Leaves, a lesson from, 19 
Leibnitz, 448 ; quoted, 449 
Letter-writers, male and female, 515 
Liars, 152 

Liberty and slavery, 169 
Life, definition of, 7; why granted 
to some, 10 ; and death, 471 ; 
symbolized, 509; two ecstatic 
moments of, 539 ; and death 
likened to two streams, 539 
Light, 424 ; and darkness, 28, 481 ; 

through a hedge, 165 
Lines, on wild scenery, 18; the 
shepherd boy’s ambition, 23 ; the 
moon, 28 ; night, 31 ; “abuse I 


N N 


2 









548 


INDEX. 


would use,” 24 ; snow, 424 ; snow 
dissolving, 426; the heart stunned 
and erring, prayer for guidance, 
483 ; written in an album, 517 ; 
“If roses have withered,” 526; 
bees suck but do not spoil, 535 ; 
Italy, 541 

Literary dissipation, 476 
Literature, detached thoughts in, 
283 ; national, value of a “vo¬ 
lume paramount” in, 455 
Littleness of the great, 12 
I Lives, successive, 181 
Logic, female, 517 
London and Paris, 6 
Looking-glass, a motto for, 148 
Lot’s wife, 510 
Lotteries, 489 

Love, 92, 179, 529, 536, 538 ; a 
martyrdom, 151 ; of youths and 
of virgins, 175 ; Christian, 233 ; 
to God, 423 ; descending and as¬ 
cending, 424; and harmony, 
power of, 484; the phrase “to 
be in love,” 525; of parents and 
children, 531 ; spiritual and sen¬ 
sual, 537; bodily presence not 
necessary to, 538 
Lust, the ground of cruelty, 537 
Lying, wonderful love of, 504 

Madness, temporary, 153 
Malcolm (Sir J.), 168, 507 
“Malo cum Platone errare,” &c., 
441 

Mammon worship, 471 
i Man, effect of his fall upon moral 
sensitiveness, 7 ; nature of, 138, 
141 ; his works but shadows, 178 ; 
an automaton, 182 ; his works and 
those of God, 469 ; and the earth 
must reciprocate services, 526 
Management, 19 
Mankind, 31 

Manliness and womanliness, 511 
Manner, importance of, 473 
March of intellect, vulgar notion of, 
293 

j Marriage, 138, 234; proofs of love 
in, 191 

I Mastery of self, 169, 231 

Materialism, over estimates the im¬ 
portance of mechanical inventions, 
58 ; presumption of, 520 


Means, worship of, 164 ; and end, 
181 

Mechanical inventions, use and abuse 
of, 61 
Medea, 131 

Memnon, music from the statue of, 
496 

Memorials, 13 
Memory a store-room, 429 
Men and women, 175 
Metaphysics, causes of prejudice 
against in England, 432 
Metre, heroic, 349 
Meum and tuum, 3 
Milton, 48, 416 ; absurd criticisms 
upon, 48 ; Dry den’s epigram upon, 
334 ; his epitaph on Shakspeare, 
338 ; Johnson’s criticism on, 353; 
quoted, 246, 424, 475, 538 
Minds, like a sheet of paper, 427 ; 

some like suns, some moons, 481 
Ministry and Church, 224 
Mirth, 236 

Misers and spendthrifts, 198 
Mist, effects of, 178 
Mistrust, 199 

Modem times, spiritual genius of, 
171 

Modesty, true, 6 
Money, pursuit of, 480 
Moon, 6 ; lines on the, 28 
Moral qualities like flowers, 13 
Morality, conventional, compared 
with the Bible, 251 
More, Sir Thomas, life of, quoted, 
118 ; Henry, quoted, 123 
Motives, inferior moral, 11 ; judg¬ 
ment of, 137 ; a vile one to love 
God, 236 

Mountain scenery, 18 ; tour, plea¬ 
sure of, 25 

Mountains compared to great men, 
179 

“Multa fiunt eadem sed aliter,’ 
473 

Music, 16 

Mystic and the materialist, 165 
Mysteries of antiquity, 147 
Mythology and religion, 418 

Names, power of, 134 
Napoleon, 12, 182 ; his paleness, 
428 

National strength, 76 














INDEX. 


549 


Nature, expounded by art and science, 
32 ; and art mutually expound 
each, other, 33 ; love of, in Homer, 
38; art, artifice, 196 ; simplicity 
of, 510 ; and art, difference be¬ 
tween their works, 533 
Necromancy, 174 

Niebuhr, 59, 149 ; quoted, 76, 208 
Night, thoughts, 31 ; levelling effect 
of, 506 

Nineteenth century characterised by 
Shakspeare, 255 

No and yes, difficulty of saying, 
474 

Notions and ideas, 285 
Novels, 345 ; evil of, 516 ; senti¬ 
mental, 537 

Novelties in opinion, 154 
“Nullius addictus jurare in verba 
magistri,” 455 

Obscurantism, 481 
Offerings, free-will, 519 
Old age, 533 

Oracular and written wisdom, 285 
Oratory, 16, 94, 381 
Ordeals, 489 

Order, 474 ; in the universe, man 
an apparent exception, 485 
Originality of thought rare, 16 
Ostracism, modern, 26 
Overfulness, 355 
Oversight, 482 

Painters and poets paint themselves, 
412 

Painting and poetry contrasted, 46 ; 
compared with history, 262 ; and 
poetry, 340 

Pantheism, monotheism, and trini- 
tarianism, and their likes in 
politics, 520 
Paris and London, 6 
Parishes should interchange their 
apprentices, 3 

Parliamentary reform, 93 ^ 
Pedantry apparent, 32 
Penny-wise, pound foolish, 230 
“ Pereant qui ante nos,” &c., 32 
Perfectibility, human, 293, 301, 325, 
329, 333 
Period, 179 

Permanence of our words and deeds, 
206 


Persecution, religious, 416 
Personality, and unity, 24; the 
bane of conversation, 507 
Philanthropy, 538 
Philip Van Artevelde, author of, 48 
Philology and Philosophy, 504 
Philosophers’ view of priests, 255 
Philosophical teaching, true and 
false, 434 

Philosophy, Christian, 7 ; and poetry, 
178 ; the circumnavigation of 
human nature, 430; of the 
human mind, 432 ; German, 451 ; 
divine, 482 ; popular, 484 
Phrenology, 66 

Picturesque, origin of taste for, 33 ; 
love of, 35, 37 ; no descriptions 
in ancient poets, 38 
Picturesqueness, 13 
Pilgrim’s Progress, Coleridge upon, 
354 

Pishashee, 5 

Plain language, power of, 354 
Plato, his style, 206 ; and Cicero, 
442 

Poet, his belief, 24 ; his sympathy 
with the world around, 55 ; his 
business, 466 

Poetic vision, 190; diction, how 
vitiated, 349 
Poetical dreamers, 347 
Poetry, 10, 25, 384, 371 ; sources 
of, 24; ancient and modern, 41 ; 
and painting contrasted, 46 ; 
worth of, 78; and verses, 137; 
of the 18th century, 138 ; and 
philosophy, 177 ; study of, 185 ; 
and history, which is truer ? 187 ; 
to be popular must not be too 
poetical, 344 ; intrusion of re¬ 
flection into, 371 ; its various 
forms in the different stages of a 
people’s life, 389 ; true, must be 
national, 390 ; the drama, the 
manhood of, 391; injured (espe¬ 
cially the drama) by diffusion of 
reading, 393 ; reflective spirit, 
injurious to, 393 

Poets, modern, special difficulties of, 
394 ; which of the ancients most 
popular, 411 
Polemical artillery, 92’ 

Politeness, 518 

Political unions and enmities, 18 ; 





550 


INDEX. 


changes, 174 ; economists, an 
axiom of theirs examined, 521 
Pollarded nations, 73 
Polygamy in England, 34 
Poor-laws, 28 ; use of the poor, 254, 
355 ; want of places of recreation 
for, 477 

Pope, his translation of Homer, 48 ; 

his epigram on Newton, 336 
Portraits, 153 

Potential and optative moods, 231 
“Pouvoir c’est vouloir,” 173 
Poverty, 147 ; and wealth, 151 
Praise, and blame, public men must 
be indifferent to, 197 ; of others, 
use to be made of, 471 ; evil of, 
527 

Prayer, 201 

Preaching, 380; true earnestness, 
essential in, 384; written sermons, 
427 

Prejudice, 1, 4, 13, 153; outweighs 
truth, 467 

Presence of mind, 181 

Present age, one characteristic of, 355 

Pretenders on crutches, 287 

Pride and vanity, 253 

Priests and philosophers, 254 

Princess, the, 513 

Principle, men of, 174; and motive, 
198 

Privateers, 12 

Prizes for neat cottages, &c., cen¬ 
sured, 478 

Prodigality, good and evil, 422 
Productive and reflective minds, 371 
Progress, dislike of, 150 
Progressiveness of mankind, 301, 
325, 329, 333; and perfectibility 
of mankind, opinions regarding, at 
different periods, 301, 325 
Property and propretd, 412 
Prose writing of the 17 th century, 
137 

Providence, recognition of, in small 
as well as great events, 423 
Prudence, Christian, 27 
Punic war, 4 
Purity, 170, 172, 174 
Pygmalion, more than one, 376 

“Qu^erenda pecunia primum est,” 
&c. 479 

Quakerism, 123, 126 


Radical Reform, 191, 192 
Rambler, 457 
Raphael, 416 

Reading, desultory, 146; light, 440 
Reality of character, 482 
Reason, unhallowed, 198; distrust 
of, 231; and imagination, 367; 
its authority undermined by 
science, 485 ; its name abused and 
misapplied, 485; a serious matter, 
518 

Reflective spirit in modern literature, 
368 

Reform, 192 

Reformers, an objection to, answered, 
15 

Religion, 1, 178; consequence of re¬ 
garding it as an antidote, 252; 
difficulties of, 254; notion of im¬ 
proving, 297; what was its prac¬ 
tical influence in the ancient world, 
419 ; difficulty of changing, 471; 
essential to civil society, 492 
Religious works, permanence of, 87; 
duty, sum of, 252 

Repentance in sickness or old age, 
176 

Reproof, reception of, 176 
Reptiles and reviewers, 505 
Resolutions, sudden, 505 
Responsibility, moral, 497 
Restlessness, love of, 378 
Revealed knowledge, 15 
Revelations before our Saviour, 540 
Reverence for sacred things, 489 
Reviewers and authors, 148; and 
reptiles, 505 

Revision of a writer’s works, 361 
Revolutions, 465 

Rhine, its influence upon German 
national character, 71 
Rhone, 18 

Riches, intellectual, their advantages 
and disadvantages, 144; doubled 
by sharing, 196 

‘ ‘ Ridentem dicere verum quid vetat, ’ ’ 
236 ** 

Ridicule, 238; consistent with love, 
347; use and abuse of, 249; fear 
of, 251 

Right, difficulty of doing, 31; men 
love to be in the, 466; doing and 
right thinking, 488 
Roman Catholicism in the Tyrol and 







INDEX. 


551 


at Rome contrasted, 29; poets, 
few, the cause, 148; and Greek 
characters contrasted, 415 
Romans, 135 ; want of individuality 
among, 415 

Rome, 11, 13; want of truthfulness 
at, 21; as art sank, comfort in¬ 
creased at, 470 

Romish church, contest with, 161; 

in some things to be envied, 489 
Roper’s life of More quoted, 118 
Rose-leaf stained, 136 
Ruins and their accidents, a lesson 
from, 177 

Rule proved by exception, 510 

Sacrilege, a discussion upon, 490 
Saint Peter’s, 19, 20, 488 
Saint’s tragedy, 513 
Sans culotterie, 520 
“Sauve qui peut,” 480 
Scepticism, 497; and bigotry, 464 
Schiller quoted (letter to Goethe), 
386 

Schlegel (Wm.), 468 
Schleiermacher, 245 
Schoolmen and their accusers, 286 
Schubert quoted, 98 
Science and poetry, 339 
Scriptures, holy, 199; sanction the 
use of irony, 244 

Sea, effect of its presence on national 
character, 68 

Self-anatomy, morbid, 398, 401 
Self-conquest (French), 413 
Self-depreciation not humility, 483 
Self-distrust, the first step to self- 
knowledge, 436 

Self-examination, Christian, 405; its 
abuse, 406 

Self-knowledge, 509; first step to, 
437 

Self-love, 143, 171; warps the judg¬ 
ment, 518 

Self-mastery, 169, 231 
Self-reflective characters in Shak- 
speare, 402 
Self-sacrifice, 412 
Selfishness, 468; in religion, 133 
Sense and nonsense, 509 
Senses, not necessarily the only 
medium of perception, 8; internal, 
176 

Shadow and substance, 151 


Shadows, 163 

Shakspeare, 43, 182, 183, 385; his 
genius, 340; Troilus and Cressida, 
341; self-reflective characters in, 
402; quoted, 129, 403 
Shallowness (in character), abyss of, 
427 

Shelley, quoted, 401; “ I had rather 
be damned with Plato,” &c., 445 
Sheridan, 52 
Siddons, Mrs., 132 
Sinking in the world, 92 
Sins, bodily, more curable than 
mental, 14 

Sisters, moral anti-septics, 234 
Sizars, 154 
Slavery, 22 

Smoke, fattening on, 151 
Snow, 424, 425 ; dissolving, 426 
Society, progress of, compared to a 
waterfall, 18 
Socinians, 199 

Socrates, his last hour, 420; his 
magnanimous saying, 466 
Solar system, a type of a happy 
family, 532 
Solger quoted, 69, 412 
Song, 77 

Sophism, accumulating, 162 
South and Yoltaire, 150; quoted, 15, 
438 

Speaking, the best training for style, 
348; and writing, in what different, 
427 

Speculative habits, result of, 476 
Spirit, effect of the Holy, compared 
with the sun, 13, 27 
“Spirituel,” 287 

Squares of London, exclusiveness of, 
478 

Statesmanship, 227, 428; Christian, 
196 

Steffens, quoted, 512 
Sterling and Carlyle, 384; quoted, 
453 

Stewart, Dugald, 432, 433 
Storms, summer and winter, 471 
Strength (and weakness) of mind, 202 
Study, proper for youth of a free 
country, 2; course of, 77* 

Style, in writing and speaking, 93, 
202, 219; simplicity of, 203, 
209; that of women, 204; of 
Plato, 205; speaking, the best 




552 


INDEX. 


training for, 348; in writing, 
359, 437; the dashing, 376; 
practice of underlining, 376; in 
writing, must be intelligible, 437; 
but should demand some exertion 
in the reader, 438 

Sufferings, how they may be lessened, 
519 * 

Sun on a cloudy day, 540 
Sunday, prevalent feeling regarding, 
495 

Sunshine, effect of unvaried, 484; 

effect of natural and mental, 505 
Sympathy, craving for, 509 

Talkers, great, 413 
Talking, 94 

Tares and wheat, parable of, 92 
Taste, 137 

Taylor, Jeremy, quoted, 244 
Teachers, sometimes fail to learn, 
488; compared to the Hebrew 
mid wives, 500 
Tell, William, story of, 261 
Temptation, our secret love of, 191 
Theatre, every man has his own, 413 
Third-thoughted men, 154 
Thirlwall, 68 

Tborwaldsen, anecdotes of, 56 
Thou and you, use of by ancients and 
moderns, &c., Ill, 129 
Thought, 153; fields of, need to lie 
fallow, 441; like light, is social 
and sportive, 465 
Thrift, 229 

Tieck, quoted, 99; Coleridge’s esti¬ 
mate of, 355 
Time no agent, 25 
Tinsel, man’s love of, 79 
To-day, to-morrow, yesterday, 147 
Tolerance, sometimes another name 
for indifference, 470 
Tragedy, Greek and German, 374; 
obsolete modes of faith or super¬ 
stition not to be introduced into, 
375 

Translations, 501; injurious to litera¬ 
ture, 352 

Translator, duty of a, 207 
Translation, 80, 88 
Travel, 163 

Truism misapplied, 503 
Trust, 278 

Truth, 173, 236; like wine, to be 


palatable must be drugged, 378 ; 
difficulties in search of, most bene¬ 
ficial, 438; all importance of, 441; 
to be preferred to Plato, 441; and 
beauty lost by severing what God 
has joined, 470; and money, com¬ 
parative estimate of (French), 480; 
to be preferred to love, 498 ; and 
falsehood, 499; no monopoly or 
patent in, 524; first sight of, 539 
Truthfulness in writing, 356 
Turner’s tour in Normandy quoted, 
156 

“Turning the back on oneself,” 
sometimes desirable, 151 

Unbelief, 201 

Understanding, the consequence of 
its superseding conscience and 
reason, 77; wit, fancy, 441 
Unitarianism, 27, 151 
Use and worth, 196 
Usefulness and good, 487 

Vacuum, effect of, 520 
Vanity, 6; fair, 8; and pride, 253 
Variations of feeling, 1 
Veil, the white, profaned as often as 
the black, 427 
Verses, nonsense, 352 
Vice, 78, 231 

Village green, loss of the, 487 
Virtue, disbelief in, 7; with the 
ancients and with us, 170, 172; 
heathen and Christian contrasted, 
525 

Virtues of the good and of the bad 
man, 190 

Voltaire and South, 150 
“Volumes, paramount,” 455 

Wants, real and imaginary, 478 
War, 495; horrors of, 468 
Warmth of lowly places, 231 
Wastefulness of moral gifts, 422 
We and I, 96 

Wellington on his losses in battle, 
469 

Wife, mistress, mother, 24; choice 
of a, 427 
“Wight,” 102 
Wilfulness, 471 
Will, 252 

Winged words, 285 













INDEX. 


55 3 


Wisdom, its kingdom not of this 
world, 339; is alchemy—finds 
good in everything, 418 ; and folly, 
481 

Wise, intellect of the, 10 

Wit and wisdom, 237; home-bred, 
500 

Womanliness and manliness, 511 

Woman’s heart, strength of, 512 

Women, what should they write? 
514; and men, 175; their style 
in writing, 204 

Words, 222; new, 209; winged, 
285; their force worn away by use, 
474 

Wordsworth, 355, 357, 360, 362, 
368, 470, 529; quoted, 355, 357, 
359, 362, 368, 369 


Work, to be done day by day as it 
arises, 429; of the wise, 469 
World, the need to feel the reality of 
this and the next, 496; clinging 
to this (French), 317 
Worlds, telescopic and microscopic, 255 
Worship of God accounted idleness, 
496 

Worth and use, 196 
Writers, 441; pernicious, 137; com¬ 
pared with the Jews, 163 
Writing, object of, 347; good and 
bad, 348 

Yes and No, 254; difficulty of say¬ 
ing, 473 

Zeuxis, story of, 446 


THE END. 


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BIBLICAL ANTIQUITIES, BIOGRAPHY, 

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Alford, Key. Henry, D.D., 

Dean of Canterbury. 

Bailey, Rev. H., M.A., 

Warden of St. Augustine’s, Canter¬ 
bury. 

Barry, Rev. A., M.A. 

Head Master of the Grammar School, 
Leeds. 

Bevan, Rev. W. L., M.A. 

Vicar of Hay, Brecknockshire. 

Brown, Rev. T. E., M.A., 

Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. 

Browne, Rev. R. W., M.A., 

Prof, of Class. Lit., King’s College, 
London. 

Bullock, Rev. W. T., M.A., 

Secretary of the Society for Propagat¬ 
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Cotton, Right Rev. G. E. L., D.D., 
Lord Bishop of Calcutta. 

Clark, Rev. Samuel, M.A., 

Principal of the Training College, 
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Cook, Rev. F. C., M.A., 

One of H.M.’s Inspectors of Schools. 

Davies, Rev. J., LI., M.A., 

Fellow of Trinity Coll., Cambridge. 

Drake, Rev. William, M.A., 

Late Fellow of St. John’s College, 
Cambridge. 

Ellicott, Rev. C. J., B.D., 

Professor of Divinity, King’s Col¬ 
lege, London. 


WRITERS. 

Elwin, Rev. Whitwell, B.A., 
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Fergusson, James, Esq., F.R.A.S. 

Ffoulkes, Edmund S., M.A. 

Gotch, Rev. F. W., M.A., 

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of London. 

Grove, George, Esq., Sydenham. 

Hawkins, Rev. Ernest, B.D., 

Prebendary of St Paul’s, and Sec. 
of the Society for Propagating 
the Gospel in Foreign Parts. 

Hayman, Rev. Henry, M.A., 

Late Fellow of St. John’s College, 
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Hervey, Hon. and Rev. Lord 
Arthur, M.A. 

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Layard, Austen, H., Esq., D.C.L. 

Leathes, Rev. Stanley, M.A., 
Jesus’ College, Cambridge, 












DICTIONARY OF BIBLICAL ANTIQUITIES, ko.—{Continued) 


Marks, Rev. D. W., 

Professor of Hebrew in University 
College, London. 

Meyrick, Rev. F., M.A., 

One of H.M.’s Inspectors of Schools. 

Orger, Rev. E. R., M.A., 

Fellow of St. Augustine’s College, 
Canterbury. 

Perowne, Rev. J. J. S., B.D., 

Hebrew and Divine Lecturer in 
King’s College, London. 

Perowne, Rev. T. T., M.A., 

Fellow of Corpus Christi College, 
Cambridge. 

Plumptre, Rev. E. H., M.A., 

Prof, of Pastoral Theo., King’s Coll., 
London. 

Phillott, Rev. H. W., M.A., 

Late Student of Christchurch. 

Poole, E. Stanley, Esq. 

Poole, R. Stuart, Esq., 

British Museum. 

Porter, Rev. J. L., M.A., 

Author of “ Handbook of the Holy 
Land. ” 


Pritchard, Rev. C., M.A., 

Head Master of the Grammar School, 
Clapham. 

Rawlinson, Rev. Gr., M.A., 

Late Fellow and Tutor of Ex. Coll., 
Oxford. 

Rose, Rev. H. J., B.D., 

Late Fellow of St. John’s College, 
Cambridge. 

Selwyn, Rev. William, D.D., 

Margaret Professor of Divinity, 
Cambridge. 

Stanley, Rev. Arthur P., D.D., 
Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical 
History, Oxford. 

Theodores, T., Esq., Manchester. 

Thomson, Rev. William, D.D., 
Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford. 

Venables, Rev. Edmund, M.A., 
Bonchurch, Isle of Wight. 

Westcott, Rev. B. F., M.A., 

Late Fellow of Trinity College, Cam¬ 
bridge. 

Wright, William, Esq., M.A., 
Trinity College, Cambridge. 


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Lardner’s Hand-Rook of Electricity, Magnetism, and 

Acoustics. 395 Illustrations. 1 vol., small 8vo. 5s. 

Lardner’s Natural Philosophy for Schools. 

328 Illustrations. 1 vol., large 12mo., 3s. fid. cloth. 

Lardner’s Chemistry for Schools. 

170 Illustrations. I vol., large 12mo. 3s. 6d. cloth. 













6 WORKS PUBLISHED BY 


Pictorial Illustrations of Science and Art. Large Printed 

Sheets, each containing Irom 50 to 100 Engraved Figures. 


Part I. Is. 6d. 

1. Mechanic Powers. 

2. Machinery. 

3. Watch and Clock Work. 


Part II. Is. 6d. 

4. Elements of Machinery. 

5. Motion and Force. 

6. Steam Engine. 


Part III. Is. 6d. 

7. Hydrostatics. 

8. Hydraulics. 

9. Pneumatics. 


Gardner’s Popular Geology. (From “ The Museum oi 

Science and Art.”) 201 Illustrations. 2s. 6d. 


Gardner’s Common Things Explained. Containing 

Air—Earth—Fire—Water—Time—The Almanack—Clocks and Watches—Spec 
tacles—Colour—Kaleidoscope—Pumps—Man—The Eye — The Printing Press — 
The Potter’s Art—Locomotion and Transport—The Surface of the Earth, or Firs 
Notions of Geography. (From “The Museum of Science and Art.”) With 235 
Illustrations. Complete, 5s., cloth lettered. 

*** Sold also in Two Series, 2s. 6d. each. 

Gardner’s Popular Physics. Containing: Magnitude and 

Minuteness—Atmosphere—Thunder and Lightning—Terrestrial Heat—Meteori< 
Stones—Popular Fallacies—Weather Prognostics — Thermometer — Barometer- 
Safety Lamp — Whitworth’s Micrometric Apparatus — Electro-Motive Power — 
Sound—Magic Lantern—Camera Obscura—Camera Lucida—Looking Glass—Ste 
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85 Illustrations. 2s. 6d. cloth lettered. 


Gardner’s Popular Astronomy. Containing: How t« 

Observe the Heavens—Latitudes and Longitudes — The Earth—The Sun—The 
Moon—The Planets: are they Inhabited?—The New Planets—Leverrier anc 
Adams’s Planet—The Tides—Lunar Influences—and the Stellar Universe—Light 
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182 Illustrations. Complete, 4s. 6d. cloth lettered. 

*** Sold also in Two Series, 2s. 6d. and 2s. each. 

Gardner on the Microscope. (From “ The Museum ol 

Science and Art.”) 1 vol. 147 Engravings. 2s. 

Gardner on the Bee and White Ants; their Manners 

and Habits; with Illustrations of Animal Instinct and Intelligence. (From “ Th< 
Museum of Science and Art.”) I vol. 135 Illustrations. 2s., cloth lettered. 

Gardner on Steam and its Uses; including the Steam 

Engine and Locomotive, and Steam Navigation. (From “ The Museum of Science 
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Gardner on the Electric Telegraph, Popularised. Witli 

100 Illustrations. (From “The Museum of Science and Art.”) 12mo., 250 pages 
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*** The following Works from “ Lar doer's Museum of Science and Art? mat, 
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Common Things. Two series in one vol.7s. 6d. 

Popular Astronomy. Two series in one vol.7s. Od. 

Electric Telegraph, with Steam and its Uses. In one vol. . 7s. Od. 

Microscope and Popular Physics. In one vol.7s. Od. 

Popular Geology, and Bee and White Ants. In one vol. . 7s. 6d. 

Gardner on the Steam Engine, Steam Navigation, Roads 

and Railways. Explained and Illustrated. Eighth Edition. With numerous Ulus 
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A Guide to the Stars for every Night in the Year. Ii 

Eight Planispheres. With an Introduction. 8vo. 5s., cloth. 

Minasi’s Mechanical Diagrams. For the Use of Gee. 

turers and Schools. 15 Sheets of Diagrams, coloured, 15s., illustrating the follow 
ing subjects: 1 and 2. Composition of Forces.—3. Equilibrium.—4 and 5. Levers 
—6. Steelyard, Brady Balance, and Danish Balance.—7. Wheel and Axle.—8 
Inclined Plane.—9, 10, 11. Pulleys.—12. Hunter’s Screw.—13 and 14. Toothei 
Wheels.—15. Combination of the Mechanical Powers. 










WALTON AND MABERLY. 


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LOGIC. 

?0°™e a, 8y„ OS 6 S C; 6d Or ’ the Ca,C "' US ° f I,lfere «“. 
Be Morgan’s Syllabus of a Proposed System of Logic. 8vo. is. 

' ei p.-fn^r t ? f r ® e ? s J on j ,1 & : a Popular Exposition of the 

Pxinciples of Logic, Inductive and Deductive; with an Introductory Outline of 

Note" 1S Swj8y^%, a M.^r en<ii)t °" ^ L ° glCI “ Devel "P me ” ls ’ ’rtth 


ENGLISH COMPOSITION. 

feil’s Elements of Rhetoric; a manual of the Laws of 

laste, mcluding the Theory and Practice of Composition. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d., cl. 


DRAWING. 

jineal Drawing Copies for the earliest Instruction. Com. 

prising iipwards of 200 subjects on 24 sheets, mounted on 12 pieces of thick paste¬ 
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Outlines without Perspective. 67 subjects, in a Portfolio. By the Author of 
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Sold also in Two Sets. 

et I. Twenty-six Subjects mounted on thick pasteboard, in a Portfolio. 3s. fid. 
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he copies are sufficiently large and bold to be drawn from by forty or fifty children 

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SINGING. 

musical Gift from an Old Friend, containing Twenty- 

four New Songs for the Young. By W. E. Hickson, author of the Moral Songs of 
“ The Singing Master.” 8vo. 2s. 6d. 

he Singing master. Containing First Lessons in Singing, 

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Sold also in Five Parts, any of which may be had separately. 

—First Lessons in Singing and the Notation of music. 

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I.—Rudiments of the Science of Harmony or Thorough 

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Musical Terms connected with this branch of Science. 8vo. Is., sewed. 

[I.—The First Class Tune Book. A Selection of Thirty 

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—The Hymn Tune Book. A Selection of Seventy 

popular Hymn and Psalm Tunes, arranged with a view of facilitating the progress 
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* The Vocal Exercises, Moral Son^s, and Hymns, with the Music, may also be had, 
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8 WORKS PUBLISHED BY WALTON AND MABERLY . 


CHEMISTRY. 


ffy a w?i"i^d!i*^ORF.doRT,^r^D.y l la^e I 'profesao^'^r Ch(^jdst^^n til 

t _c Sr,^ieT.KXied. 6, id. cloth. 


Organic Chemistry. Fourth Edition, very carefully revised, and greatly enlarge. 
12s., cloth. (SoId separately.) 


Chemistry for Schools. By Dr. Lardner. 

tions. Large 12mo. 3s. 6d. cloth. 


190 Illustra 


“a&SB®»laS3£%SwS 

Small 8vo. 7s. 6d. cloth. 


Liebig’s Letters on Modern Agriculture. Small Svo. 6 


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Liebig’s Chemistry in its Applications to Agriculture an 

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s«sr. ! sr* & «h^n 

work). 8vo. 6s. 6d., cloth. 


w i^iiiir’s Hand-Book of Organic Analysis; containing 

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Composition of Organic Substances. Illustrated by 85 Woodcuts. 12mo. 5s.,clo1 


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Chemical Properties of Gases, together with the Methods of Gas Analysis. Fifl 
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Parnell on Dyeing and Calico Printing. (Reprinted fro 

Parnell’s “ Applied Chemistry in Manufactures, Arts, and Domestic Econoi 
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GENERAL LITERATURE. 


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Re™ rencfby which the Almanac maybe found for every Year, whether m 
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of finding the Day of New or Full Moon, from b.c. 2000 to a.d. 2000. 5s., cl 

lettered. 


r nesses at Truth. By Two Brothers. New Edith 

With an Index. Complete in 1 vol. Small 8vo. Handsomely bound in c. 
with red edges. 10s. 6d. 


late of Soul 


Iludall’s Memoir of the Rev. Janies Crabb ; 

ampton. With Portrait. Large 12mo., 6s., cloth. 

ilersclicll (R.H). The Jews; a brief Sketch of 

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